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Little Masterpieces 

Edited by Bliss Perry 



JOHN RUSKIN 

M 

THE TWO BOYHOODS 

THE SLAVE SHIP 

THE MOUNTAIN GLOOM 

THE MOUNTAIN GLORY 

VENICE 

ST. MARK'S 

ART AND MORALS 

THE MYSTERY OF LIFE 

PEACE 



NEW YORK 
DOUBLEDAY & McCLURE CO. 

i8g8 









y 






15913 



Copyright, 1898, by 

DOUBLEDAY & McCLURE Co. 



Acknowledgment is due Messrs. Wiley <5r» Son 

for permission to use selections from the text 

of their Popular Edition of Ruskiri s Works 







nw> copies BtCt.»to. 



Introduction 



Editor's Introduction 



Mr. Ruskin's writings have been so copious, 
and so varied in theme and temper, that no two 
of his admirers would be likely to agree in their 
selection of characteristic passages from his 
books. The editor of the present volume can- 
not hope that it will wholly satisfy those readers 
who already know their Ruskin well. He has 
simply endeavored, by a chronological arrange- 
ment of carefully chosen extracts, to show some- 
thing of the succession of themes that have 
occupied Mr. Ruskin's mind, as well as the sort 
of writing which early established and has long 
sustained his reputation as a master of English. 

The hero of his first work, " Modern Pain- 
ters," was the artist Turner. Readers were first 
attracted by his descriptive eloquence, rather 
than by the intrinsic worth of his message to the 
public. Here was a new kind of prose, — though 
one more carefully modelled upon Richard 
Hooker and other old writers than most people 
v 



Editor's Introduction 

imagined, — a prose captivating in its music, its 
color, and the long supple coil of its periods. 
The chapter entitled "The Two Boyhoods" — 
Giorgione's and Turner's — is a good example 
of this early manner. It is followed here by 
Mr. Ruskin's famous description of Turner's 
" Slave Ship," a piece of writing which takes 
as much liberty with the picture as the picture 
in turn does with nature. Such writing, in 
Mr. Ruskin's hands, is strangely suggestive to 
the imagination, but in the hands of his imita- 
tors it has done much to obliterate the natural 
distinction between literary and graphic art and 
to vitiate the later prose of England and 
America. 

The chapters upon "The Mountain Gloom n 
and " The Mountain Glory," reprinted here in 
part, show the patient study of scientific detail, 
the enthusiasm for natural beauty, and the ten- 
dency to moralize upon the relations of beauty 
to conduct which from the first have character- 
ized Mr. Ruskin's mind. In any one of these 
three directions his influence over his contem- 
poraries would have been enough to give him 
distinction, but it is quite possible that what he 
has done to help people to use their eyes may 
ultimately prove a more valuable contribution 
to his generation than all his subtle and inge- 
nious essays in philosophical analysis. 

But there are many other ways in which he 
vi 



Editors Introduction 

has guided the thought and feeling of cultivated 
people. Few travellers visit Florence and Ven- 
ice without acquainting themselves, however 
superficially, with Mr. Ruskin's criticisms of the 
architecture and allied arts of the great artistic 
epochs. " The Stones of Venice " contains 
some of his most carefully elaborated work. I 
have reprinted the chapter describing the situa- 
tion of Venice, as well as the paragraphs devoted 
to the exterior of St. Mark's. 

As Mr. Ruskin advanced in life, the ethical 
cast of his mind predominated more and more 
over the aesthetic. The analyst of the rela- 
tions of science to art, the critic who traced the 
lines of the building back to the fortitude and 
faith of the builders, brooded increasingly over 
the fate of common men and women in this 
perplexed age of the world. The lecture on 
"The Mystery of Life and its Arts" expresses 
some of his own perplexity and his strenuous 
sense of the duties that are to be performed. 
The lecture on " The Relation of Art to Morals " 
is an acute and suggestive discourse upon a 
subject that has always occupied his attention, 
but which he has rarely discussed so much to 
the reader's profit as here. The fragment from 
"The Eagle's Nest" entitled "Peace" may 
appropriately close these selections from the 
books of a man who has felt most keenly the 
discords of modern life, but who has not always 
vii 



Editor's Introduction 

been able to point out with any practical help- 
fulness a way of escape. 

It will be seen that I have not drawn upon 
Mr. Ruskin's more technical productions, either 
his studies of rock and leaf, flower and bird, or 
his detailed criticisms of architecture and paint- 
ing. Nor has anything been borrowed from his 
later writings in the field of political economy 
and social science. There is much in these 
later books that is whimsical and perverse, 
much wilful glorification of mediaevalism, much 
following of his " master" Carlyle's bad fashion 
of ignoring the best forces of his own age. The 
Ruskinian political economy has not yet been 
accepted by the economists, any more than his 
theories of art have been accepted by the critics, 
or his workingmen's gospel believed in very 
largely by the workingmen themselves. But 
Mr. Ruskin has found a sure refuge in the 
"general reader," who knows pretty well in a 
vague way what he wants from a book, and who 
is, after all, the final judge of an author's place 
in literature. The " general reader " has long 
been loyal to Mr. Ruskin, liking not only his 
knowledge of his subject and his skill with 
words, but his noble passion for beauty and 
goodness, his noble scorn of injustice and evil. 
Looked at too narrowly, Mr. Ruskin's career 
seems a succession of caprices. He has wor- 
shipped, in turn, Turner and Tintoretto, Botti- 
viii 



Editors Introduction 

celli and Carlyle ; his concrete art teaching has 
repeatedly changed its substance, and his reli- 
gious faith its form.* Yet in the true perspec- 
tive these contradictions disappear, his spirit 
and intention become plain, and the whole 
power of an extraordinarily gifted man seems 
steadily directed towards making human life 
more beautiful and bountiful. 

Bliss Perry. 

*Fors Clavigera, Letters LXXVL, LXXVIII. 



IX 



Contents 



PAGE 

The Two Boyhoods . . . . . .3 

The Slave Ship 27 

The Mountain Gloom . . . > 33 

The Mountain Glory . . . . 59 

Venice 73 

St. Mark's 91 

Art and Morals 103 

The Mystery of Life .... 135 

Peace . . 189 



The Two Boyhoods 



The Two Boyhoods 

§ i. Born half-way between the mountains 
and the sea — that young George of Castel- 
franco — of the Brave Castle: — Stout George 
they called him, George of Georges, so goodly 
a boy he was — Giorgione. 

Have you ever thought what a world his eyes 
opened on — fair, searching eyes of youth? 
What a world of mighty life, from those moun- 
tain roots to the shore; — of loveliest life, when 
he went down, yet so young, to the marble city 
— and became himself as a fiery heart to it ? 

A city of marble, did I say? nay, rather a 
golden city, paved with emerald. For truly, 
every pinnacle and turret glanced or glowed, 
overlaid with gold, or bossed with jasper. Be- 
neath, the unsullied sea drew in deep breathing, 
to and fro, its eddies of green wave. Deep- 
hearted, majestic, terrible as the sea, — the men 
of Venice moved in sway of power and war ; 
pure as her pillars of alabaster, stood her mo- 

3 



John Ruskin 

thers and maidens ; from foot to brow, all noble, 
walked her knights ; the low bronzed gleaming 
of sea-rusted armor shot angrily under their 
blood-red mantle-folds. Fearless, faithful, pa- 
tient, impenetrable, implacable, — every word a 
fate — sate her senate. In hope and honor, 
lulled by flowing of wave around their isles of 
sacred sand, each with his name written and 
the cross graved at his side, lay her dead. A 
wonderful piece of world. Rather, itself a 
world. It lay along the face of the waters, no 
larger, as its captains saw it from their masts at 
evening, than a bar of sunset that could not 
pass away ; but, for its power, it must have 
seemed to them as if they were sailing in the ex- 
panse of heaven, and this a great planet, whose 
orient edge widened through ether. A world 
from which all ignoble care and petty thoughts 
were banished, with all the common and poor 
elements of life. No foulness, nor tumult, in 
those tremulous streets, that filled, or fell, be- 
neath the moon ; but rippled music of majestic 
change, or thrilling silence. No weak walls 
could rise above them ; no low-roofed cottage, 
nor straw-built shed. Only the strength as of 
rock, and the finished setting of stones most 
precious. And around them, far as the eye 
could reach, still the soft moving of stainless 
waters, proudly pure ; as not the flower, so 
neither the thorn nor the thistle, could grow in 
4 



The Two Boyhoods 

the glancing fields. Ethereal strength of Alps, 
dream-like, vanishing in high procession be- 
yond the Torcellan shore ; blue islands of Paduan 
hills, poised in the golden west. Above, tree 
winds and fiery clouds ranging at their will;— 
brightness out of the north, and balm from the 
south, and the stars of the evening and morn- 
ing clear in the limitless light of arched heaven 
and circling sea. 

Such was Giorgione's school — such Titian's 
home. 

§ 2. Near the south-west corner of Covent 
Garden, a square brick pit or well is formed by 
a close-set block of houses, to the back windows 
of which it admits a few rays of light. Access 
to the bottom of it is obtained out of Maiden 
Lane, through a low archway and an iron gate; 
and if you stand long enough under the arch- 
way to accustom your eyes to the darkness, you 
may see on the left hand a narrow door, which 
formerly gave quiet access to a respectable bar- 
bels shop, of which the front window, looking 
into Maiden Lane, is still extant, filled in this 
year (i860), with a row of bottles, connected, 
in some defunct manner, with a brewer's busi- 
ness. A more fashionable neighborhood, it is 
said, eighty years ago than now — never cer- 
tainly a cheerful one — wherein a boy being 
born on St. George's day, 1775, began soon 
after to take interest in the world of Covent 

5 



John Ruskin 

Garden, and put to service such spectacles of 
life as it afforded. 

§ 3. No knights to be seen there, nor, I im- 
agine, many beautiful ladies ; their costume at 
least disadvantageous, depending much on in- 
cumbency of hat and feather, and short waists; 
the majesty of men founded similarly on shoe- 
buckles and wigs; — impressive enough when 
Reynolds will do his best for it ; but not sug- 
gestive of much ideal delight to a boy. 

"Bello ovile dov' io dormii agnello:" of 
things beautiful, besides men and women, dusty 
sunbeams up or down the street on summer 
mornings ; deep furrowed cabbage leaves at the 
greengrocer's ; magnificence of oranges in wheel- 
barrows round the corner ; and Thames' shore 
within three minutes' race. 

§ 4. None of these things very glorious; the 
best, however, that England, it seems, was then 
able to provide for a boy of gift : who, such as 
they are, loves them — never, indeed, forgets 
them. The short waists modify to the last his 
visions of Greek ideal. His foregrounds had 
always a succulent cluster or two of greengrocery 
at the corners. Enchanted oranges gleam in 
Covent Gardens of the Hesperides; and great 
ships go to pieces in order to scatter chests of 
them on the waves. That mist of early sun- 
beams in the London dawn crosses, many and 
many a time, the clearness of Italian air; and 
6 



The Two Boyhoods 

by Thames' shore, with its stranded barges and' 
glidings of red sail, dearer to us than Lucerne 
lake or Venetian lagoon, — by Thames' shore 
we will die. 

$ 5. With such circumstance round him in 
youth, let us note what necessary effects followed 
upon the boy. I assume him to have had Gior- 
gione's sensibility (and more than Giorgione's, 
if that be possible) to color and form. I tell 
you farther, and this fact you may receive trust- 
fully, that his sensibility to human affection and 
distress was no less keen than even his sense- 
for natural beauty — heart-sight deep as eye- 
sight. 

Consequently, he attaches himself with the' 
faithfullest child-love to everything that bears; 
an image of the place he was born in. No 
matter how ugly it is, — has it anything about 
it like Maiden Lane, or like Thames' shore ? If 
so, it shall be painted for their sake. Hence, 
to the very close of life, Turner could endure 
ugliness which no one else, of the same sensi- 
bility, would have borne with for an instant. 
Dead brick walls, blank square windows, old 
clothes, market-womanly types of humanity — 
anything fishy and muddy, like Billingsgate or 
Hungerford Market, had great attraction for 
him; black barges, patched sails, and every 
possible condition of fog. 

§ 6. You will find these tolerations and affeo 

7 



John Ruskin 

tions guiding or sustaining him to the last hour 
of his life ; the notablest of all such endurances 
being that of dirt. No Venetian ever draws 
anything foul; but Turner devoted picture after 
picture to the illustration of effects of dinginess, 
smoke, soot, dust, and dusty texture ; old sides 
of boats, weedy roadside vegetation, dunghills, 
straw-yards, and all the soilings and stains of 
every common labor. 

And more than this, he not only could en- 
dure, but enjoyed and looked for litter, like 
Covent Garden wreck after the market. His 
pictures are often full of it, from side to side ; 
their foregrounds differ from all others in the 
natural way that things have of lying abr in 
them. Even his richest vegetation, ir> deal 
work, is confused ; and he delights in shingle, 
debris, and heaps of fallen stones. The last 
words he ever spoke to me about a picture were 
in gentle exaltation about his St. Gothard : 
"that litter of stones which I endeavored to 
represent." 

§ 7. The second great result of this Covent 
Garden training was, understanding of and re- 
gard for the poor, whom the Venetians, we 
saw, despised ; whom, contrarily, Turner loved, 
and more than loved — understood. He got no 
romantic sight of them, but an infallible one, 
as he prowled about the end of his lane, watch- 
ing night effects in the wintry streets ; nor sight 
8 



The Two Boyhoods 

of the poor alone, but of the poor in direct re- 
lations with the rich. He knew, in good and 
evil, what both classes thought of, and how 
they dwelt with, each other. 

Reynolds and Gainsborough, bred in country 
villages, learned there the country boy's rever- 
ential theory of " the squire/' and kept it. 
They painted the squire and the squire's lady 
as centres of the movements of the universe, to 
the end of their lives. But Turner perceived 
the younger squire in other aspects about his 
lane, occurring prominently in its night scenery, 
as a dark figure, or one of two, against the 
moonlight. He saw also the working of city 
cci ;]^erce, from endless warehouse, towering 
over^Thames, to the back shop in the lane, 
with its ^tale herrings — highly interesting these 
last; one of his father's best friends, whom he 
often afterwards visited affectionately at Bristol, 
being a fishmonger and glueboiler; which gives 
us a friendly turn of mind towards herring-fish- 
ing, whaling, Calais poissardes, and many other 
of our choicest subjects in after life; all this 
being connected with that mysterious forest 
below London Bridge on one side; — and, on 
the other, with these masses of human power 
and national wealth which weigh upon us, at 
Covent Garden here, with strange compression, 
and crush us into narrow Hand Court. 

$ 8. "That mysterious forest below London 

9 



John Ruskin 

Bridge " — better for the boy than wood of pine, 
or grove of myrtle. How he must have tor- 
mented the watermen, beseeching them to let 
him crouch anywhere in the bows, quiet as a 
log, so only that he might get floated down 
there among the ships, and round and round 
the ships, and with the ships, and by the ships, 
and under the ships, staring and clambering; — 
these the only quite beautiful things he can see 
in all the world, except the sky; but these, 
when the sun is on their sails, filling or falling, 
endlessly disordered by sway of tide and stress 
of anchorage, beautiful unspeakably; which 
ships also are inhabited by glorious creatures — 
red-faced sailors, with pipes, appearing over the 
gunwales, true knights, over their castle para- 
pets — the most angelic beings in the whole 
compass of London world. And Trafalgar hap- 
pening long before we can draw ships, we, 
nevertheless, coax all current stories out of the 
wounded sailors, do our best at present to show 
Nelson's funeral streaming up the Thames; 
and vow that Trafalgar shall have its tribute of 
memory some day. Which, accordingly, is ac- 
complished — once, with all our might, for its 
death ; twice, with all our might, for its vic- 
tory ; thrice, in pensive farewell to the old 
Temeraire, and, with it, to that order of 
things. 

§ 9. Now this fond companying with sailors 
10 



The Two Boyhoods 

must have divided his time, it appears to me, 
pretty equally between Covent Garden and 
Wapping (allowing for incidental excursions to 
Chelsea on one side, and Greenwich on the 
other), which time he would spend pleasantly, 
but not magnificently, being limited in pocket- 
money, and leading a kind of " Poor-Jack " life 
on the river. 

In some respects, no life could be better for a 
lad. But it was not calculated to make his ear 
fine to the niceties of language, nor form his 
moralities on an entirely regular standard. 
Picking up his first scraps of vigorous English 
chiefly at Deptford and in the markets, and his 
first ideas of female tenderness and beauty 
among nymphs of the barge and the barrow, — 
another boy might, perhaps, have become what 
people usually term " vulgar." But the original 
make and frame of Turner's mind being not 
vulgar, but as nearly as possible a combination 
of the minds of Keats and Dante, joining capri- 
cious waywardness, and intense openness to 
every fine pleasure of sense, and hot defiance 
of formal precedent, with a quite infinite tender- 
ness, generosity, and desire of justice and truth 
— this kind of mind did not become vulgar, but 
very tolerant of vulgarity, even fond of it in 
some forms; and, on the outside, visibly in- 
fected by it, deeply enough ; the curious result, 
in its combination of elements, being to most 
II 



John Ruskin 

people wholly incomprehensible. It was as if a 
cable had been woven of blood-crimson silk, 
and then tarred on the outside. People handled 
it, and the tar came off on their hands; red 
gleams were seen through the black, under- 
neath, at the places where it had been strained. 
Was it ochre? — said the world — or red lead? 

$ 10. Schooled thus in manners, literature, 
and general moral principles at Chelsea and 
Wapping, we have finally to inquire concerning 
the most important point of all. We have seen 
the principal differences between this boy and 
Giorgione, as respects sight of the beautiful, 
understanding of poverty, of commerce, and of 
order of battle; then follows another cause of 
difference in our training — not slight, — the 
aspect of religion, namely, in the neighborhood 
of Covent Garden. I say the aspect ; for that 
was all the lad could judge by. Disposed, for 
the most part, to learn chiefly by his eyes, in 
this special matter he finds there is really no 
other way of learning. His father taught him 
" to lay one penny upon another. n Of mother's 
teaching, we hear of none; of parish pastoral 
teaching, the reader may guess how much. 

$11. I chose Giorgione rather than Veronese 
to help me in carrying out this parallel ; because 
I do not find in Giorgione's work any of the 
early Venetian monarchist element. He seems 
to me to have belonged more to an abstract 
12 



The Two Boyhoods 

contemplative school. I may be wrong in this ; 
it is no matter; — suppose it were so, and that 
he came down to Venice somewhat recusant, or 
insentient, concerning the usual priestly doc- 
trines of his day, — how would the Venetian re- 
ligion, from an outer intellectual standing-point, 
have looked to him ? 

§ 12. He would have seen it to be a religion 
indisputably powerful in human affairs ; often 
very harmfully so ; sometimes devouring widows' 
houses, and consuming the strongest and fairest 
from among the young ; freezing into merciless 
bigotry the policy of the old : also, on the other 
hand, animating national courage, and raising 
souls, otherwise sordid, into heroism : on the 
whole, always a real and great power ; served 
with daily sacrifice of gold, time, and thought; 
putting forth its claims, if hypocritically, at least 
in bold hypocrisy, not waiving any atom of them 
in doubt or fear ; and, assuredly, in large mea- 
sure, sincere, believing in itself, and believed: 
a goodly system, moreover, in aspect; gorgeous, 
harmonious, mysterious; — a thing which had 
either to be obeyed or combated, but could not 
be scorned. A religion towering over all the 
city — many-buttressed — luminous in marble 
stateliness, as the dome of our Lady of Safety 
shines over the sea ; many-voiced also, giving, 
over all the eastern seas, to the sentinel his 
watchword, to the soldier his war-cry ; and, on 

13 



John Ruskin 

the lips of all who died for Venice, shaping the 
whisper of death. 

§ 13. I suppose the boy Turner to have re- 
garded the religion of his city also from an 
external intellectual standing-point. 

What did he see in Maiden Lane ? 

Let not the reader be offended with me ; I am 
willing to let him describe, at his own pleasure, 
what Turner saw there; but to me, it seems to 
have been this. A religion maintained occa- 
sionally, even the whole length of the lane, at 
point of constable's staff; but, at other times, 
placed under the custody of the beadle, within 
certain black and unstately iron railings of St. 
Paul's, Covent Garden. Among the wheelbar- 
rows and over the vegetables, no perceptible 
dominance of religion; in the narrow, disquieted 
streets, none; in the tongues, deeds, daily ways 
of Maiden Lane, little. Some honesty, indeed, 
and English industry, and kindness of heart, 
and general idea of justice ; but faith, of any 
national kind, shut up from one Sunday to the 
next, not artistically beautiful even in those 
Sabbatical exhibitions; its paraphernalia being 
chiefly of high pews, heavy elocution, and cold 
grimness of behavior. 

What chiaroscuro belongs to it — (dependent 

mostly on candlelight), — we will, however, 

draw considerately ; no goodliness of escutcheon, 

nor other respectability being omitted, and the 

14 



The Two Boyhoods 

best of their results confessed, a meek old woman 
and a child being let into a pew, for whom the 
reading by candlelight will be beneficial.* 

§ 14. For the rest, this religion seems to him 
discreditable — discredited — not believing in 
itself, putting forth its authority in a cowardly 
way, watching how far it might be tolerated, 
continually shrinking, disclaiming, fencing, 
finessing ; divided against itself, not by stormy 
rents, but by thin fissures, and splittings of 
plaster from the walls. Not to be either obeyed, 
or combated, by an ignorant, yet clear-sighted 
youth ; only to be scorned. And scorned not 
one whit the less, though also the dome dedi- 
cated to it looms high over distant winding of 
the Thames ; as St. Mark's campanile rose, for 
goodly landmark, over mirage of lagoon. For 
St. Mark ruled over life ; the Saint of London 
over death ; St. Mark over St. Mark's Place, 
but St. Paul over St. Paul's Churchyard. 

§15. Under these influences pass away the 
first reflective hours of life, with such conclusion 
as they can reach. In consequence of a fit of 
illness, he was taken — I cannot ascertain in 
what year — to live with an aunt, at Brentford ; 
and here, I believe, received some schooling, 

* Liber Studiorum. " Interior of a church." It is worthy of 
remark that Giorgione and Titian are always delighted to have 
an opportunity of drawing priests. The English Church may, 
perhaps, accept it as matter of congratulation that this is the 
only instance in which Turner drew a clergyman. 

*5 



John Ruskin 

which he seems to have snatched vigorously; 
getting knowledge, at least by translation, of 
the more picturesque classical authors, which 
he turned presently to use, as we shall see. 
Hence also, walks about Putney and Twicken- 
ham in the summer time acquainted him with 
the look of English meadow-ground in its re- 
stricted states of paddock and park; and with 
some round-headed appearances of trees, and 
stately entrances to houses of mark : the avenue 
at Bushy, and the iron gates and carved pillars 
of Hampton, impressing him apparently with 
great awe and admiration ; so that in after life 
his little country house is, — of all places in the 
world, — at Twickenham ! Of swans and reedy 
shores he now learns the soft motion and the 
green mystery, in a way not to be forgotten. 

§ 1 6. And at last fortune wills that the lad's 
true life shall begin ; and one summer's even- 
ing, after various wonderful stage-coach experi- 
ences on the north road, which gave him a love 
of stage-coaches ever after, he finds himself 
sitting alone among the Yorkshire hills.* For 
the first time, the silence of Nature round him, 
her freedom sealed to him, her glory opened to 
him. Peace at last ; no roll of cart-wheel, nor 

* I do not mean that this is his first acquaintance with the 
country, but the first impressive and touching one, after his 
mind was formed. The earliest sketches I found in the National 
Collection are at Clifton and Bristol ; the next, at Oxford. 

16 



The Two Boyhoods 

mutter of sullen voices in the back shop ; but 
curlew-cry in space of heaven, and welling of 
bell-toned streamlet by its shadowy rock. Free- 
dom at last. Dead- wall, dark railing, fenced 
field, gated garden, all passed away like the 
dream of a prisoner ; and behold, far as foot or 
eye can race or range, the moor, and cloud. 
Loveliness at last. It is here then, among these 
deserted vales ! Not among men. Those pale, 
poverty-struck, or cruel faces; — that multitu- 
dinous, marred humanity — are not the only 
things that God has made. Here is something 
He has made which no one has marred. Pride 
of purple rocks, and river pools of blue, and 
tender wilderness of glittering trees, and misty 
lights of evening on immeasurable hills. 

§17. Beauty, and freedom, and peace; and 
yet another teacher, graver than these. Sound 
preaching at last here, in Kirkstall crypt, con- 
cerning fate and life. Here, where the dark 
pool reflects the chancel pillars, and the cattle 
lie in unhindered rest, the soft sunshine on their 
dappled bodies, instead of priests' vestments; 
their white furry hair ruffled a little, fitfully, by 
the evening wind, deep-scented from the meadow 
thyme. 

§ 18. Consider deeply the import to him of 
this, his first sight of ruin, and compare it with 
the effect of the architecture that was around 
Giorgione. There were indeed aged buildings, 

?7 



John Ruskin 

at Venice, in his time, but none in decay. All 
ruin was removed, and its place filled as quickly 
as in our London ; but filled always by archi- 
tecture loftier and more wonderful than that 
whose place it took, the boy himself happy to 
work upon the walls of it ; so that the idea of 
the passing away of the strength of men and 
beauty of their works never could occur to him 
sternly. Brighter and brighter the cities of 
Italy had been rising and broadening on hill 
and plain, for three hundred years. He saw 
only strength and immortality, could not but 
paint both ; conceived the form of man as death- 
less, calm with power, and fiery with life. 

§ 19. Turner saw the exact reverse of this. 
In the present work of men, meanness, aimless- 
ness, unsightliness : thin-walled, lath-divided, 
narrow-garreted houses of clay ; booths of a 
darksome Vanity Fair, busily base. 

But on Whitby Hill, and by Bolton Brook, 
remained traces of other handiwork. Men who 
could build had been there; and who also had 
wrought, not merely for their own days. But 
to what purpose? Strong faith, and steady 
hands, and patient souls — can this, then, be all 
you have left ! this the sum of your doing on 
the earth ! — a nest whence the night-owl may 
whimper to the brook, and a ribbed skeleton of 
consumed arches, looming above the bleak 
banks of mist, from its cliff to the sea ? 
18 



The Two Boyhoods 

As the strength of men to Giorgione, to 
Turner their weakness and vileness, were alone 
visible. They themselves, unworthy or ephem- 
eral ; their work, despicable, or decayed. In the 
Venetian's eyes, all beauty depended on man's 
presence and pride ; in Turner's, on the solitude 
he had left, and the humiliation he had suffered. 

§ 20. And thus the fate and issue of all his 
work were determined at once. He must be a 
painter of the strength of nature, there was no 
beauty elsewhere than in that ; he must paint 
also the labor and sorrow and passing away of 
men ; this was the great human truth visible to 
him. 

Their labor, their sorrow, and their death. 
Mark the three. Labor; by sea and land, in 
field and city, at forge and furnace, helm and 
plough. No pastoral indolence nor classic pride 
shall stand between him and the troubling of 
the world ; still less between him and the toil 
of his country, — blind, tormented, unwearied, 
marvellous England. 

§21. Also their Sorrow; Ruin of all their 
glorious work, passing away of their thoughts 
and their honor, mirage of pleasure, Fallacy 
OF Hope ; gathering of weed on temple step ; 
gaining of wave on deserted strand ; weeping of 
the mother for the children, desolate by her 
breathless first-born in the streets of the city,* 

* "The Tenth Plague of Egypt." 

J 9 



John Ruskin 

desolate by her last sons slain, among the 
beasts of the field.* 

$ 22. And their Death. That old Greek 
question again ; — yet unanswered. The uncon- 
querable spectre still flitting among the forest 
trees at twilight ; rising ribbed out of the sea- 
sand; — white, a strange Aphrodite, — out of 
the sea- foam ; stretching its gray, cloven wings 
among the clouds; turning the light of their 
sunsets into blood. This has to be looked upon, 
and in a more terrible shape than ever Salvator 
or Durer saw it. The wreck of one guilty 
country does not infer the ruin of all countries, 
and need not cause general terror respecting the 
laws of the universe. Neither did the orderly 
and narrow succession of domestic joy and sor- 
row in a small German community bring the 
question in its breadth, or in any unresolvable 
shape, before the mind of Durer. But the 
English death — the European death of the 
nineteenth century — was of another range and 
power; more terrible a thousand-fold in its 
merely physical grasp and grief; more terrible, 
incalculably, in its mystery and shame. What 
were the robber's casual pang, or the rage of 
the flying skirmish, compared to the work of 
the axe, and the sword, and the famine, which 
was done during this man's youth on all the 
hills and plains of the Christian earth, from 

* "Rizpah, the Daughter of Aiah." 
20 



The Two Boyhoods 

Moscow to Gibraltar? He was eighteen years 
old when Napoleon came down on Areola. 
Look on the map of Europe, and count the 
blood-stains on it, between Areola and Waterloo. 

$ 23. Not alone those blood-stains on the 
Alpine snow, and the blue of the Lombard 
plain. The English death was before his eyes 
also. No decent, calculable, consoled dying; 
no passing to rest like that of the aged burghers 
of Nuremberg town. No gentle processions to 
churchyards among the fields, the bronze crests 
bossed deep on the memorial tablets, and the 
skylark singing above them from among the 
corn. But the life trampled out in the slime of 
the street, crushed to dust amidst the roaring 
of the wheel, tossed countlessly away into howl- 
ing winter wind along five hundred leagues of 
rock-fanged shore. Or, worst of all, rotted 
down to forgotten graves through years of igno- 
rant patience, and vain seeking for help from 
man, for hope in God — infirm, imperfect yearn- 
ing, as of motherless infants starving at the 
dawn ; oppressed royalties of captive thought, 
vague ague-fits of bleak, amazed despair. 

§ 24. A goodly landscape this, for the lad to 
paint, and under a goodly light. Wide enough 
the light was, and clear ; no more Salvator's 
lurid chasm on jagged horizon, nor Duress 
spotted rest of sunny gleam on hedgerow and 
field; but light over all the world. Full shone 
21 



John Ruskin 

now its awful globe, one pallid charnel-house, — 
a ball strewn bright with human ashes, glaring 
in poised sway beneath the sun, all blinding- 
white with death from pole to pole, — death, 
not of myriads of poor bodies only, but of will, 
and mercy, and conscience ; death, not once 
inflicted on the flesh, but daily, fastening on 
the spirit ; death, not silent or patient, waiting 
his appointed hour, but voiceful, venomous; 
death with the taunting word, and burning 
grasp, and infixed sting. 

" Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe." 
The word is spoken in our ears continually to 
other reapers than the angels — to the busy 
skeletons that never tire for stooping. When 
the measure of iniquity is full, and it seems 
that another day might bring repentance and 
redemption, — "Put ye in the sickle." When 
the young life has been wasted all away, and 
the eyes are just opening upon the tracks of 
ruin, and faint resolution rising in the heart for 
nobler things, — " Put ye in the sickle." When 
the roughest blows of fortune have been borne 
long and bravely, and the hand is just stretched 
to grasp its goal, — "Put ye in the sickle." 
And when there are but a few in the midst of a 
nation, to save it, or to teach, or to cherish ; 
and all its life is bound up in those few golden 
ears, — " Put ye in the sickle, pale reapers, and 
pour hemlock for your feast of harvest home." 

22 



The Two Boyhoods 

This was the sight which opened on the 
young eyes, this the watchword sounding within 
the heart of Turner in his youth. 

So taught, and prepared for his life's labor, 
sate the boy at last alone among his fair English 
hills; and began to paint, with cautious toil, 
the rocks, and fields, and trickling brooks, and 
soft, white clouds of heaven. 



23 



The Slave Ship 



The Slave Ship 

But, I think, the noblest sea that Turner has 
ever painted, and, if so, the noblest certainly 
ever painted by man, is that of the Slave Ship, 
the chief Academy picture of the Exhibition of 
1840. It is a sunset on the Atlantic after pro- 
longed storm ; but the storm is partially lulled, 
and the torn and streaming rain-clouds are mov- 
ing in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the 
hollow of the night. The whole surface of sea 
included in the picture is divided into two ridges 
of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a 
low, broad heaving of the whole ocean, like 
the lifting of its bosom by deep-drawn breath 
after the torture of the storm. Between these 
two ridges, the fire of the sunset falls along the 
trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but 
glorious light, the intense and lurid splendor 
which burns like gold and bathes like blood. 
Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing 
waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly 
27 



John Ruskin 

divided, lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fan- 
tastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly 
shadow behind it along the illumined foam. 
They do not rise everywhere, but three or four 
together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, 
as the under strength of the swell compels or 
permits them ; leaving between them treacher- 
ous spaces of level and whirling water, now 
lighted with green and lamp-like fire, now flash- 
ing back the gold of the declining sun, now 
fearfully dyed from above with the indistinguish- 
able images of the burning clouds, which fall 
upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and 
give to the reckless waves the added motion of 
their own fiery flying. Purple and blue, the 
lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast 
upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold 
and low, advancing like the shadow of death 
upon the guilty* ship as it labors amidst the 
lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon 
the sky in lines of blood, girded with condem- 
nation in that fearful hue which signs the sky 
with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with 
the sunlight, — and cast far along the desolate 
heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the 
multitudinous sea. 

I believe, if I were reduced to rest Turner's 
immortality upon any single work, I should 

* She is a slaver, throwing her slaves overboard. The near 
sea is encumbered with corpses. 

28 



The Slave Ship 

choose this. Its daring conception — ideal in 
the highest sense of the word — is based on the 
purest truth, and wrought out with the concen- 
trated knowledge of a life ; its color is absolutely- 
perfect, not one false or morbid hue in any part 
or line, and so modulated that every square inch 
of canvas is a perfect composition ; its drawing 
as accurate as fearless; the ship buoyant, 
bending, and full of motion ; its tones as true 
as they are wonderful ; and the whole picture 
dedicated to the most sublime of subjects and 
impressions — (completing thus the perfect sys- 
tem of all truth, which we have shown to be 
formed by Turner's works) — the power, maj- 
esty, and deathfulness of the open, deep, illim- 
itable Sea. 



29 



The Mountain Gloom 



The Mountain Gloom 



§ I. We have now cursorily glanced over those 
conditions of mountain structure which appear 
constant in duration, and universal in extent; 
and we have found them, invariably, calculated 
for the delight, the advantage, or the teaching 
of men ; prepared, it seems, so as to contain, 
alike in fortitude or feebleness, in timeliness or 
in terror, some beneficence of gift, or profound- 
ness of counsel. We have found that where at 
first all seemed disturbed and accidental, the 
most tender laws were appointed to produce 
forms of perpetual beauty; and that where to 
the careless or cold observer it seemed severe or 
purposeless, the well-being of man has been 
chiefly consulted, and his rightly directed pow- 
ers, and sincerely awakened intelligence, may 
find wealth in every falling rock, and wisdom in 
every talking wave. 

It remains for us to consider what actual ef- 
fect upon the human race has been produced by 

33 



John Ruskin 

the generosity, or the instruction of the hills ; 
how far, in past ages, they have been thanked, 
or listened to ; how far, in coming ages, it may 
be well for us to accept them for tutors, or ac- 
knowledge them for friends. 

§ 2. What they have already taught us may, 
one would think, be best discerned in the midst 
of them, — in some place where they have had 
their own way with the human soul ; where no 
veil has been drawn between it and them, no 
contradicting voice has confused their ministries 
of sound, or broken their pathos of silence : 
where war has never streaked their streams with 
bloody foam, nor ambition sought for other 
throne than their cloud-courtiered pinnacles, 
not avarice for other treasure than, year by 
year, is given to their unlaborious rocks, in 
budded jewels, and mossy gold. 

§ 3. I do not know any district possessing 
more pure or uninterrupted fulness of mountain 
character (and that of the highest order), or 
which appears to have been less disturbed by 
foreign agencies, than that which borders the 
course of the Trient between Valorsine and Mar- 
tigny. The paths which lead to it out of the 
valley of the Rhone, rising at first in steep circles 
among the walnut trees, like winding stairs 
among the pillars of a Gothic tower, retire over 
the shoulders of the hills into a valley almost 
unknown, but thickly inhabited by an indus- 
34 



The Mountain Gloom 

trious and patient population. Along the ridges 
of the rocks, smoothed by old glaciers into long, 
dark, billowy swellings, like the backs of plun- 
ging dolphins, the peasant watches the slow col- 
oring of the tufts of moss and roots of herb 
which, little by little, gather a feeble soil over 
the iron substance; then, supporting the nar- 
row strip of clinging ground with a few stones, 
he subdues it to the spade ; and in a year or two 
a little crest of corn is seen waving upon the 
rocky casque. The irregular meadows run in 
and out like inlets of lake among these har- 
vested rocks, sweet with perpetual streamlets, 
that seem always to have chosen the steepest 
places to come down, for the sake of the leaps, 
scattering their handfuls of crystal this way and 
that, as the wind takes them, with all the grace, 
but with none of the formalism, of fountains ; 
dividing into fanciful change of dash and spring, 
yet with the seal of their granite channels upon 
them, as the lightest play of human speech may- 
bear the seal of past toil, and closing back out 
of their spray to lave the rigid angles, and 
brighten with silver fringes and glassy films 
each lower and lower step of sable stone ; until 
at last, gathered altogether again, — except, 
perhaps, some chance drops caught on the ap- 
ple-blossom, where it has budded a little nearer 
the cascade than it did last spring, — they find 
their way down to the turf, and lose themselves 

35 



John Ruskin. 

in that silently ; with quiet depth of clear water 
furrowing among the grass blades, and looking 
only like their shadow, but presently emerging 
again in little startled gushes and laughing hur- 
ries, as if they had remembered suddenly that 
the day was too short for them to get down the 
hill. 

Green field, and glowing rock, and glancing 
streamlet, all slope together in the sunshine to- 
wards the brows of the ravines, where the pines 
take up their own dominion of saddened shade ; 
and with everlasting roar in the twilight, the 
stronger torrents thunder down pale from the 
glaciers, filling all their chasms with enchanted 
gold, beating themselves to pieces against the 
great rocks that they have themselves cast 
down, and forcing fierce way beneath their 
ghastly poise. 

The mountain paths stoop to these glens 
in forky zigzags, leading to some grey and nar- 
row arch, all fringed under its shuddering curve 
with the ferns that fear the light; a cross of 
rough-hewn pine, iron-bound to its parapet, 
standing dark against the lurid fury of the foam. 
Far up the glen, as we pause beside the cross, 
the sky is seen through the openings in the 
pines, thin with excess of light ; and, in its 
clear, consuming flame of white space, the sum- 
mits of the rocky mountains are gathered into 
solemn crowns and circlets, all flushed in that 

36 



The Mountain Gloom 

strange, faint silence of possession by the sun- 
shine which has in it so deep a melancholy ; 
full of power, yet as frail as shadows ; lifeless, 
like the walls of a sepulchre, yet beautiful in 
tender fall of crimson folds, like the veil of some 
sea spirit, that lives and dies as the foam flashes ; 
fixed on a perpetual throne, stern against all 
strength, lifted above all sorrow, and yet effaced 
and melted utterly into the air by that last sun- 
beam that has crossed to them from between 
the two golden clouds. 

§ 4. High above all sorrow : yes ; but not un- 
witnessing to it. The traveller on his happy 
journey, as his foot springs from the deep turf 
and strikes the pebbles gayly over the edge of 
the mountain road, sees with a glance of de- 
light the clusters of nut-brown cottages that 
nestle among those sloping orchards, and glow 
beneath the boughs of the pines. Here, it may 
well seem to him, if there be sometimes hard- 
ship, there must be at least innocence and peace, 
and fellowship of the human soul with nature. 
It is not so. The wild goats that leap along 
those rocks have as much passion of joy in all 
that fair work of God as the men that toil among 
them. Perhaps more. Enter the street of one 
of those villages, and you will find it foul with 
that gloomy foulness that is suffered only by 
torpor, or by anguish of soul. Here, it is tor- 
por — not absolute suffering, — not starvation 

37 



John Ruskin 

or disease, but darkness of calm enduring ; the 
spring known only as the time of the scythe, 
and the autumn as the time of the sickle, and 
the sun only as a warmth, the wind as a chill, 
and the mountains as a danger. They do not 
understand so much as the name of beauty, or 
of knowledge. They understand dimly that of 
virtue. Love, patience, hospitality, faith, — 
these things they know. To glean their mea- 
dows side by side, so happier ; to bear the bur- 
den up the breathless mountain flank, unmur- 
muringiy ; to bid the stranger drink from their 
vessel of milk; to see at the foot of their low 
deathbeds a pale figure upon a cross, dying 
also, patiently; — in this they are different from 
the cattle and from the stones, but in all this 
unrewarded as far as concerns the present life. 
For them, there is neither hope nor passion of 
spirit ; for them neither advance nor exultation. 
Black bread, rude roof, dark night, laborious 
day, weary arm at sunset ; and life ebbs away. 
No books, no thoughts, no attainments, no rest ; 
except only sometimes a little sitting in the sun 
under the church wall, as the bell tolls thin and 
far in the mountain air ; a pattering of a few 
prayers, not understood, by the altar rails of 
the dimly gilded chapel, and so back to the 
sombre home, with the cloud upon them still 
unbroken — that cloud of rocky gloom, born 
out of the wild torrents and ruinous stones, and 

38 



The Mountain Gloom 

unlightened, even in their religion, except by 
the vague promise of some better thing un- 
known, mingled with threatening, and obscured 
by an unspeakable horror, — a smoke, as it were, 
of martyrdom, coiling up with the incense, and, 
amidst the images of tortured bodies and la- 
menting spirits in hurtling flames, the very 
cross, for them, dashed more deeply than for 
others, with gouts of blood. 

§ 5. Do not let this be thought a darkened 
picture of the life of these mountaineers. It is 
literal fact. No contrast can be more painful 
than that between the dwelling of any well-con- 
ducted English cottager, and that of the equally 
honest Savoyard. The one, set in the midst 
of its dull flat fields and uninteresting hedge- 
rows, shows in itself the love of brightness and 
beauty; its daisy-studded garden beds, its 
smoothly swept brick path to the threshold, its 
freshly sanded floor and orderly shelves of 
household furniture, all testify to energy of 
heart, and happiness in the simple course and 
simple possessions of daily life. The other cot- 
tage, in the midst of an inconceivable, inex- 
pressible beauty, set on some sloping bank of 
golden sward, with clear fountains flowing 
beside it, and wild flowers, and noble trees, 
and goodly rocks gathered round into a per- 
fection as of Paradise, is itself a dark and 
plague-like stain in the midst of the gentle land- 

39 



John Ruskin 

scape. Within a certain distance of its thresh- 
old the ground is foul and cattle-trampled ; its 
timbers are black with smoke, its garden choked 
with weeds and nameless refuse, its chambers 
empty and joyless, the light and wind gleaming 
and filtering through the crannies of their 
stones. All testifies that to its inhabitant the 
world is labor and vanity ; that for him neither 
flowers bloom, nor birds sing, nor fountains 
glisten ; and that his soul hardly differs from 
the grey cloud that coils and dies upon his hills ; 
except in having no fold of it touched by the 
sunbeams. 

§ 6. Is it not strange to reflect, that hardly an 
evening passes in London or Paris but one of 
those cottages is painted for the better amuse- 
ment of the fair and idle, and shaded with paste- 
board pines by the scene-shifter ; and that good 
and kind people, — poetically minded,— delight 
themselves in imagining the happy life led by 
peasants who dwell by Alpine fountains, and 
kneel to crosses upon peaks of rock ? that nightly 
we lay down our gold to fashion forth simulacra 
of peasants, in gay ribands and white bodices, 
singingsweet songs, and bowing gracefully to the 
picturesque crosses ; and all the while the verita- 
ble peasants are kneeling, songlessly, to verita- 
ble crosses, in another temper than the kind and 
fair audiences dream of, and assuredly with an- 
other kind of answer than is got out of the opera 
40 



The Mountain Gloom 

catastrophe; an answer having reference, it 
may be, in dim futurity, to those very audiences 
themselves? If all the gold that has gone to 
paint the simulacra of the cottages, and to put 
new songs in the mouths of the simulacra of the 
peasants, had gone to brighten the existent cot- 
tages, and to put new songs into the mouths of 
the existent peasants, it might in the end, per- 
haps, have turned out better so, not only for 
the peasants, but for even the audience. For 
that form of the False Ideal has also its corre- 
spondent True Ideal, — consisting not in the 
naked beauty of statues, nor in the gauze flow- 
ers and crackling tinsel of theatres, but in the 
clothed and fed beauty of living men, and in 
the lights and laughs of happy homes. Night 
after night, the desire of such an ideal springs 
up in every idle human heart ; and night after 
night, as far as idleness can, we work out this 
desire in costly lies. We paint the faded ac- 
tress, build the lath landscape, feed our benevo- 
lence with fallacies of felicity, and satisfy our 
righteousness with poetry of justice. The time 
will come when, as the heavy-folded curtain falls 
upon our own stage of life, we shall begin to 
comprehend that the justice we loved was in- 
tended to have been done in fact, and not in 
poetry, and the felicity we sympathized in, to 
have been bestowed and not feigned. We talk 
much of money's worth, yet perhaps may one 

4i 



John Ruskin 

day be surprised to find that what the wise and 
charitable European public gave to one night's 
rehearsal of hypocrisy, — to one hour's pleasant 
warbling of Linda or Lucia, — would have filled 
a whole Alpine Valley with happiness, and 
poured the waves of harvest over the famine of 
many a Lammermoor. 

§ 7. " Nay," perhaps the reader answers, " it 
is vain to hope that this could ever be. The 
perfect beauty of the ideal must always be ficti- 
tious. It is rational to amuse ourselves with the 
fair imagination; but it would be madness to 
endeavor to put it into practice, in the face of 
the ordinances of Nature. Real shepherdesses 
must always be rude, and real peasants misera- 
ble ; suffer us to turn away our gentle eyes from 
their coarseness and their pain, and to seek 
comfort in cultivated voices and purchased 
smiles. We cannot hew down the rocks, nor 
turn the sands of the torrent into gold." 

§ 8. This is no answer. Be assured of the 
great truth — that what is impossible in reality 
is ridiculous in fancy. If it is not in the nature 
of things that peasants should be gentle and 
happy, then the imagination of such peasantry 
is ridiculous, and to delight in such imagination 
wrong; as delight in any kind of falsehood is 
always. But if in the nature of things it be 
possible that among the wildness of hills the 
human heart should be refined, and if the com- 
42 



The Mountain Gloom 

fort of dress, and the gentleness of language, 
and the joy of progress in knowledge, and of 
variety in thought, are possible to the moun- 
taineer in his true existence, let us strive to 
write this true poetry upon the rocks before we 
indulge it in our visions, and try whether, 
among all the fine arts, one of the finest be not 
that of painting cheeks with health rather than 
rouge. 

§ 9. " But is such refinement possible ? Do 
not the conditions of the mountain peasant's 
life, in the plurality of instances, necessarily for- 
bid it?" 

As bearing sternly on this question, it is 
necessary to examine one peculiarity of feeling 
which manifests itself among the European na- 
tions, so far as I have noticed, irregularly, — 
appearing sometimes to be the characteris- 
tic of a particular time, sometimes of a parti- 
cular race, sometimes of a particular locality, 
and to involve at once much that is to be 
blamed and much that is praiseworthy. I 
mean the capability of enduring, or even de- 
lighting in, the contemplation of objects of ter- 
ror — a sentiment which especially influences 
the temper of some groups of mountaineers, 
and of which it is necessary to examine the 
causes, before we can form any conjecture what- 
ever as to the real effect of mountains on human 
character. 

43 



John Ruskin 

§ 10. For instance, the unhappy alterations 
which have lately taken place in the town of 
Lucerne have still spared two of its ancient 
bridges ; both of which, being long covered 
walks, appear, in past times, to have been to 
the population of the town what the Mall was 
to London, or the Gardens of the Tuileries are 
to Paris. For the continual contemplation of 
those who sauntered from pier to pier, pictures 
were painted on the woodwork of the roof. 
These pictures, in the one bridge, represent all 
the important Swiss battles and victories ; in the 
other they are the well-known series of which 
Longfellow has made so beautiful a use in the 
Golden Legend, the Dance of Death, 

Imagine the countenances with which a com- 
mittee, appointed for the establishment of a 
new " promenade " in some flourishing modern 
town, would receive a proposal to adorn such 
promenade with pictures of the Dance of Death. 

§ II. Now just so far as the old bridge at Lu- 
cerne, with the pure, deep, and blue water of 
the Reuss eddying down between its piers, and 
with the sweet darkness of green hills, and far- 
away gleaming of lake and Alps alternating 
upon the eye on either side ; and the gloomy 
lesson frowning in the shadow, as if the deep 
tone of a passing-bell, overhead, were mingling 
for ever with the plashing of the river as it glides 
by beneath ; just so far, I say, as this differs 

44 



The Mountain Gloom 

from the straight and smooth strip of level dust, 
between two rows of round-topped acacia trees, 
wherein the inhabitants of an English watering- 
place or French fortified town take their de- 
light, — so far I believe the life of the old 
Lucernois, with all its happy waves of light, and 
mountain strength of will, and solemn expecta- 
tion of eternity, to have differed from the gen- 
erality of the lives of those who saunter for their 
habitual hour up and down the modern prome- 
nade. But the gloom is not always of this 
noble kind. As we penetrate farther among 
the hills we shall find it becoming very painful. 
We are walking, perhaps, in a summer after- 
noon, up the valley of Zermatt (a German val- 
ley), the sun shining brightly on grassy knolls 
and through fringes of pines, the goats leaping 
happily, and the cattle bells ringing sweetly, 
and the snowy mountains shining like heavenly 
castles far above. We see, a little way off, a 
small white chapel, sheltered behind one of the 
flowery hillocks of mountain turf; and we ap- 
proach its little window, thinking to look through 
it into some quiet home of prayer ; but the win- 
dow is grated with iron, and open to the winds, 
and when we look through it, behold — a heap 
of white human bones mouldering into whiter 
dust! 

So also in that same sweet valley, of which I 
have just been speaking, between Chamouni 

45 



John Ruskin 

and the Valais, at every turn of the pleasant 
pathway, where the scent of the thyme lies rich- 
est upon its rocks, we shall see a little cross and 
shrine set under one of them ; and go up to it, 
hoping to receive some happy thought of the 
Redeemer, by whom all these lovely things were 
made, and still consist. But when we come 
near — behold, beneath the cross, a rude pic- 
ture of souls tormented in red tongues of hell 
fire, and pierced by demons. 

§ 12. As we pass towards Italy the appearance 
of this gloom deepens ; and when we descend 
the southern slope of the Alps we shall find this 
bringing forward of the image of Death asso- 
ciated with an endurance of the most painful 
aspects of disease, so that conditions of human 
suffering, which in any other country would be 
confined in hospitals, are permitted to be openly 
exhibited by the wayside ; and with this expo- 
sure of the degraded human form is farther 
connected an insensibility to ugliness and im- 
perfection in other things; so that the ruined 
wall, neglected garden, and uncleansed cham- 
ber, seem to unite in expressing a gloom of 
spirit possessing the inhabitants of the whole 
land. It does not appear to arise from poverty, 
nor careless contentment with little: there is 
here nothing of Irish recklessness or humor; 
but there seems a settled obscurity in the soul, — 
a chill and plague, as if risen out of a sepulchre, 

4 6 



The Mountain Gloom 

which partly deadens, partly darkens, the eyes 
and hearts of men, and breathes a leprosy of 
decay through every breeze and every stone. 
' ' Instead of well-set hair, baldness, and burn- 
ing instead of beauty." 

Nor are definite proofs wanting that the feeling 
is independent of mere poverty or indolence. In 
the most gorgeous and costly palace garden the 
statues will be found green with moss, the ter- 
races defaced or broken ; the palace itself partly 
coated with marble, is left in other places rough 
with cementless and jagged brick, its iron bal- 
conies bent and rusted, its pavements overgrown 
with grass. The more energetic the effort has 
been to recover from this state, and to shake off 
all appearance of poverty, the more assuredly 
the curse seems to fasten on the scene, and the 
unslaked mortar, and unfinished wall, and 
ghastly desolation of incompleteness entangled 
in decay, strike a deeper despondency into the 
beholder. 

§ 13. The feeling would be also more easily 
accounted for if it appeared consistent in its re- 
gardlessness of beauty, — if what was done were 
altogether as inefficient as what was deserted. 
But the balcony, though rusty and broken, is 
delicate in design, and supported on a nobly 
carved slab of marble ; the window, though a 
mere black rent in ragged plaster, is encircled 
by a garland of vine and fronted by a thicket 

47 



John Ruskin 

of the sharp leaves and aurora-colored flowers 
of the oleander ; the courtyard, overgrown by 
mournful grass, is terminated by a bright fresco 
of gardens and fountains ; the corpse, borne 
with the bare face to heaven, is strewn with 
flowers; beauty is continually mingled with the 
shadow of death. 

$ 14. So also is a kind of merriment, — not 
true cheerfulness, neither careless nor idle jest- 
ing, but a determined effort at gaiety, a resolute 
laughter, mixed with much satire, grossness, 
and practical buffoonery, and, it always seemed 
to me, void of all comfort or hope, — with this 
eminent character in it also, that it is capable of 
touching with its bitterness even the most fear- 
ful subjects, so that as the love of beauty retains 
its tenderness in the presence of death, this love 
of jest also retains its boldness, and the skeleton 
becomes one of the standard masques of the 
Italian comedy. When I was in Venice, in 
1850, the most popular piece of the comic opera 
was " Death and th ; Cobbler, " in which the 
point of the plot was the success of a village 
cobbler as a physician, in consequence of the 
appearance of Death to him beside the bed of 
every patient who was not to recover ; and the 
most applauded scene in it was one in which 
the physician, insolent in success, and swollen 
with luxury, was himself taken down into the 
abode of Death, and thrown into an agony 

48 



The Mountain Gloom 

of terror by being shown lives of men, under 
the form of wasting lamps, and his own ready 
to expire. 

§15.1 have also not the smallest doubt that 
this endurance or affronting of fearful images is 
partly associated with indecency, partly with 
general fatuity and weakness of mind. The 
men who applauded loudest when the actress 
put on, in an instant, her mask representing a 
skull, and when her sharp and clear " Sono la 
Morte " rang through the theatre, were just 
those whose disgusting habits rendered it im- 
possible for women to pass through some of the 
principal streets in Venice, — just those who 
formed the gaping audience, when a mounte- 
bank offered a new quack medicine on the Riva 
dei Schiavoni. And, as fearful imagery is asso- 
ciated with the weakness of fever, so it seems to 
me that imbecility and love of terror are con- 
nected by a mysterious link throughout the 
whole life of man. There is a most touching 
instance of this in the last days of Sir Walter 
Scott, the publication of whose latter works, 
deeply to be regretted on many accounts, was 
yet, perhaps, on the whole, right, as affording 
a means of studying the conditions of the decay 
of overwrought human intellect in one of the 
most noble of minds. Among the many signs 
of this decay at its uttermost, in Castle Danger- 
ous, not one of the least notable was the intro- 

49 



John Ruskin 



duction of the knight who bears on his black 
armor the likeness of a skeleton. 

§ 16. The love of horror which is in this man- 
ner connected with feebleness of intellect, is not, 
however, to be confounded with that shown by 
the vulgar in general. The feeling which is 
calculated upon in the preparation of pieces full 
of terror and crime, at our lower theatres, and 
which is fed with greater art and elegance in 
the darker scenery of the popular French novel- 
ists, however morally unhealthy, is not unnat- 
ural ; it is not the result of an apathy to such 
horror, but of a strong desire for excitement in 
minds coarse and dull, but not necessarily fee- 
ble. The scene of the murder of the jeweller 
in the " Count of Monte Cristo," or those with 
the Squelette in the " Mysteres de Paris," ap- 
peal to instincts which are as common to all 
mankind as those of thirst and hunger, and 
which are only debasing in the exaggerated con- 
dition consequent upon the dulness of other 
instincts higher than they. And the persons 
who, at one period of their life, might take 
chief pleasure in such narrations, at another 
may be brought into a temper of high tone and 
acute sensibility. But the love of horror re- 
specting which we are now inquiring appears 
to be an unnatural and feeble feeling; it is not 
that the person needs excitement, or has any 
such strong perceptions as would cause excite- 



The Mountain Gloom 

ment, but he is dead to the horror, and a strange 
evil influence guides his feebleness of mind 
rather to fearful images than to beautiful ones, — 
as our disturbed dreams are sometimes filled 
with ghastliness which seem not to arise out of 
any conceivable association of our waking ideas, 
but to be a vapor out of the very chambers of 
the tomb, to which the mind, in its palsy, has 
approached. 

§17. But even this imbecile revelling in ter- 
ror is more comprehensible, more apparently 
natural, than the instinct which is found fre- 
quently connected with it, of absolute joy in 
ugliness. In some conditions of old German 
art we find the most singular insisting upon 
what is in all respects ugly and abortive, or 
frightful ; not with any sense of sublimity in it, 
neither in mere foolishness, but with a resolute 
choice, such as I can completely account for on 
no acknowledged principle of human nature. 
For in the worst conditions of sensuality there 
is yet some perception of the beautiful, so that 
men utterly depraved in principle and habits of 
thought will yet admire beautiful things and 
fair faces. But in the temper of which I am 
now speaking there is no preference even of the 
lower forms of love iness ; no effort at painting 
fair limbs or passionate faces, no evidence of 
any human or natural sensation, — a mere feed- 
ing on decay and rolling in slime, not appar- 

5i 



John Ruskin 

ently or conceivably with any pleasure in it, but 
under some fearful possession of an evil spirit. 



It seems one of the most cunning and fre- 
quent of self-deceptions to turn the heart away 
from this warning and refuse to acknowledge 
anything in the fair scenes of the natural crea- 
tion but beneficence. Men in general lean 
towards the light, so far as they contemplate 
such things at all, most of them passing " by 
on the other side," either in mere plodding 
pursuit of their own work, irrespective of what 
good or evil is around them, or else in selfish 
gloom, or selfish delight, resulting from their 
own circumstances at the moment. Of those 
who give themselves to any true contempla- 
tion, the plurality, being humble, gentle, and 
kindly hearted, look only in nature for what is 
lovely and kind; partly, also, God gives the 
disposition to every healthy human mind in 
some degree to pass over or even harden itself 
against evil things, else the suffering would be 
too great to be borne ; and humble people, 
with a quiet trust that everything is for the best, 
do not fairly represent the facts to themselves, 
thinking them none of their business. So, 
what between hard-hearted people, thoughtless 
people, busy people, humble people, and cheer- 
fully minded people, — giddiness of youth, and 

5 2 



The Mountain Gloom 

preoccupations of age, — philosophies of faith, 
and cruelties of folly, — priest and Levite, mas- 
quer and merchantman, all agreeing to keep 
their own side of the way, — the evil that God 
sends to warn us gets to be forgotten, and the evil 
that He sends to be mended by us gets left un- 
mended. And then, because people shut their 
eyes to the dark indisputableness of the facts in 
front of them, their Faith, such as it is, is shaken 
or uprooted by every darkness in what is revealed 
to them. In the present day it is not easy to 
find a well-meaning man among our more ear- 
nest thinkers, who will not take upon himself 
to dispute the whole system of redemption, 
because he cannot unravel the mystery of the 
punishment of sin. But can he unravel the 
mystery of the punishment of NO sin ? Can he 
entirely account for all that happens to a cab- 
horse? Has he ever looked fairly at the fate 
of one of those beasts as it is dying, — measured 
the work it has done, and the reward it has 
got, — put his hand upon the bloody wounds 
through which its bones are piercing, and so 
looked up to Heaven with an entire understand- 
ing of Heaven's ways about the horse ? Yet 
the horse is a fact — no dream — no revelation 
among the myrtle trees by night ; and the dust 
it dies upon, and the dogs that eat it, are 
facts; — and yonder happy person, whose the 
horse was till its knees were broken over the 
53 



John Ruskin 

hurdles, who had an immortal soul to begin 
with, and wealth and peace to help forward his 
immortality ; who has also devoted the powers 
of his soul, and body, and wealth, and peace, 
to the spoiling of houses, the corruption of the 
innocent, and the oppression of the poor; and 
has, at this actual moment of his prosperous 
life, as many curses waiting round about him 
in calm shadow, with their death's eyes fixed 
upon him, biding their time, as ever the poor 
cab-horse had launched at him in meaningless 
blasphemies, when his failing feet stumbled at 
the stones, — this happy person shall have no 
stripes, — shall have only the horse's fate of 
annihilation ; or, if other things are indeed 
reserved for him, Heaven's kindness or omnipo- 
tence is to be doubted therefore. 

§ 33* We cannot reason of these things. 
But this I know — and this may by all men be 
known — that no good or lovely thing exists in 
this world without its correspondent darkness; 
and that the universe presents itself continually 
to mankind under the stern aspect of warning, 
or of choice, the good and the evil set on the 
right hand and the left. 

And in this mountain gloom, which weighs 
so strongly upon the human heart that in all 
time hitherto, as we have seen, the hill defiles 
have been either avoided in terror or inhabited 
in penance, there is but the fulfilment of the 

54 



The Mountain Gloom 

universal law, that where the beauty and wis- 
dom of the Divine working are most mani- 
fested, there also are manifested most clearly 
the terror of God's wrath, and the inevitable- 
ness of His power." 

Nor is this gloom less wonderful so far as it 
bears witness to the error of human choice, 
even when the nature of good and evil is most 
definitely set before it. The trees of Paradise 
were fair ; but our first parents hid themselves 
from God " in medio ligni Paradisi," in the 
midst of the trees of the garden. The hills 
were ordained for the help of man ; but, instead 
of raising his eyes to the hills, from whence 
cometh his help, he does his idol sacrifice " upon 
every high hill and under every green tree." 
The mountain of the Lord's house is established 
above the hills ; but Nadab and Abihu shall 
see under His feet the body of heaven in his 
clearness, yet go down to kindle the censer 
against their own souls. And so to the end of 
time it will be ; to the end, that cry will still 
be heard among the Alpine winds, "Hear, oh 
ye mountains, the Lord's controversy ! " Still, 
their gulfs of thawless ice, and unretarded roar 
of tormented waste, and deathful falls of fruit- 
less waste, and unredeemed decay, must be the 
image of the souls of those who have chosen the 
darkness, and whose cry shall be to the moun- 
tains to fall on them, and to the hills to cover 

55 



John Ruskin 

them; and still, to the end of time, the clear 
waters of the unfailing springs, and the white 
pasture-lilies in their clothed multitude, and 
the abiding of the burning peaks in their near- 
ness to the opened heaven, shall be the types, 
and the blessings, of those who have chosen 
light, and of whom it is written, "The moun- 
tains shall bring peace to the people, and the 
little hills, righteousness." 



56 



The Mountain Glory 



The Mountain Glory 

§ I. I HAVE dwelt, in the foregoing chapter, 
on the sadness of the hills with the greater in- 
sistance that I feared my own excessive love for 
them might lead me into too favorable interpre- 
tation of their influences over the human heart; 
or, at least, that the reader might accuse me 
of fond prejudice, in the conclusions to which, 
finally, I desire to lead him concerning them. 
For, to myself, mountains are the beginning and 
the end of all natural scenery; in them, and 
in the forms of inferior landscape that lead to 
them, my affections are wholly bound up ; and 
though I can look with happy admiration at 
the lowland flowers, and woods, and open skies, 
the happiness is tranquil and cold, like that of 
examining detached flowers in a conservatory, 
or reading a pleasant book ; and if the scenery 
be resolutely level, insisting upon the declara- 
tion of its own flatness in all the detail of it, as 
in Holland, or Lincolnshire, or Central Lom- 

59 



John Ruskin 

bardy, it appears to me like a prison, and I 
cannot long endure it. But the slightest rise 
and fall in the road, — a mossy bank at the side 
of a crag of chalk, with brambles at its brow, 
overhanging it, — a ripple over three or four 
stones in the stream by the bridge, — above all, 
a wild bit of ferny ground under a fir or two, 
looking as if, possibly, one might see a hill if 
one got the other side of the trees, will in- 
stantly give me intense delight, because the 
shadow, or the hope, of the hills is in them. 
§ 2. And thus, although there are few dis- 
tricts of Northern Europe, however apparently 
dull or tame, in which I cannot find pleasure, 
though the whole of Northern France (except 
Champagne), dull as it seems to most travel- 
lers, is to me a perpetual Paradise ; and, putting 
Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, and one or two such 
other perfectly flat districts aside, there is not 
an English county which I should not find en- 
tertainment in exploring the cross-roads of, foot 
by foot ; yet all my best enjoyment would be 
owing to the imagination of the hills, coloring, 
with their far-away memories, every lowland 
stone and herb. The pleasant French coteau, 
green in the sunshine, delights me, either by 
what real mountain character it has in itself (for 
in extent and succession of promontory the 
flanks of the French valleys have quite the sub- 
limity of true mountain distances), or by its 
60 



The Mountain Glory 

broken ground and rugged steps among the 
vines, and rise of the leafage above, against the 
blue sky, as it might rise at Vevay or Como. 
There is not a wave of the Seine but is associated 
in my mind with the first rise of the sandstones 
and forest pines of Fontainebleau ; and with the 
hope of the Alps, as one leaves Paris with the 
horses' heads to the south-west, the morning 
sun, flashing on the bright waves of Charenton. 
If there be no hope or association of this kind, 
and if I cannot deceive myself into fancying that 
perhaps at the next rise of the road there may 
be seen the film of a blue hill in the gleam of 
sky at the horizon, the landscape, however beau- 
tiful, produces in me even a kind of sickness 
and pain ; and the whole view from Richmond 
Hill or Windsor Terrace, — nay, the gardens of 
Alcinous, with their perpetual summer, — or of 
the Hesperides (if they were flat, and not close 
to Atlas), golden apples and all — I would give 
away in an instant, for one mossy granite stone 
a foot broad, and two leaves of lady-fern. 

§ 3. I know that this is in great part idiosyn- 
crasy ; and that I must not trust to my own 
feelings, in this respect, as representative of the 
modern landscape instinct ; yet I know it is not 
idiosyncrasy, in so far as there may be proved 
to be indeed an increase of the absolute beauty 
of all scenery in exact proportion to its moun- 
tainous character, providing that character be 
61 



John Ruskin 

healthily mountainous. I do not mean to take 
the Col de Bon Homme as representative of 
hills, any more than I would take Romney 
Marsh as representative of plains ; but putting 
Leicestershire or Staffordshire fairly beside 
Westmoreland, and Lombardy or Champagne 
fairly beside the Pays de Vaud or the Canton 
Berne, I find the increase in the calculable sum 
of elements of beauty to be steadily in propor- 
tion to the increase of mountainous character; 
and that the best image which the world can 
give of Paradise is in the slope of the meadows, 
orchards, and corn-fields on the sides of a great 
Alp, with its purple rocks and eternal snows 
above; this excellence not being in any wise a 
matter referable to feeling, or individual prefer- 
ences, but demonstrable by calm enumeration 
of the number of lovely colors on the rocks, the 
varied grouping of the trees, and quantity of 
noble incidents in stream, crag, or cloud, pre- 
sented to the eye at any given moment. 

% 4. For consider, first, the difference pro- 
duced in the whole tone of landscape color by 
the introductions of purple, violet, and deep 
ultramarine blue, which we owe to mountains. 
In an ordinary lowland landscape we have the 
blue of the sky ; the green of grass, which I will 
suppose (and this is an unnecessary concession 
to the lowlands) entirely fresh and bright; the 
green of trees ; and certain elements of purple, 
62 



The Mountain Glory 

far more rich and beautiful than we generally 
should think, in their bark and shadows (bare 
hedges and thickets, or tops of trees, in subdued 
afternoon sunshine, are nearly perfect purple, 
and of an exquisite tone), as well as in ploughed 
fields, and dark ground in general. But among 
mountains, in addition to all this, large un- 
broken spaces of pure violet and purple are 
introduced in their distances ; and even near, 
by films of cloud passing over the darkness of 
ravines or forests, blues are produced of the 
most subtle tenderness ; these azures and pur- 
ples passing into rose-color of otherwise wholly 
unattainable delicacy among the upper sum- 
mits, the blue of the sky being at the same time 
purer and deeper than in the plains, Nay, in 
some sense, a person who has never seen the 
rose-color of the rays of dawn crossing a blue 
mountain twelve or fifteen miles away, can hardly 
be said to know what te7iderness in color means 
at all ; bright tenderness he may, indeed, see 
in the sky or in a flower, but this grave ten- 
derness of the far-away hill-purples he cannot 
conceive. 

% 5. Together with this great source of pre- 
eminence in mass of color, we have to estimate 
the influence of the finished inlaying and 
enamel- work of the color-jewellery on every 
stone ; and that of the continual variety in spe- 
cies of flower; most of the mountain flowers 

63 



John Ruskin 

being, besides, separately lovelier than the low- 
land ones. The wood hyacinth and wild rose 
are, indeed, the only supreme flowers that the 
lowlands can generally show ; and the wild rose 
is also a mountaineer, and more fragrant in the 
hills, while the wood hyacinth, or grape hya- 
cinth, at its best cannot match even the dark 
bell-gentian, leaving the light-blue star-gentian 
in its uncontested queenliness, and the Alpine 
rose and Highland heather wholly without simil- 
itude. The violet, lily of the valley, crocus, 
and wood anemone are, I suppose, claimable 
partly by the plains as well as the hills; but 
the large orange lily and narcissus I have never 
seen but on hill pastures, and the exquisite 
oxalis is preeminently a mountaineer. 

§ 6. To this supremacy in mosses and flow- 
ers we have next to add an inestimable gain in 
the continual presence and power of water. 
Neither in its clearness, its color, its fantasy of 
motion, its calmness of space, depth, and re- 
flection, or its wrath, can water be conceived by 
a lowlander, out of sight of sea. A sea wave is 
far grander than any torrent — but of the sea 
and its influences we are not now speaking; 
and the sea itself, though it ca?i be clear, is 
never calm, among our shores, in the sense 
that a mountain lake can be calm. The sea 
seems only to pause ; the mountain lake to 
sleep, and to dream. Out of sight of the ocean, 

6 4 



The Mountain Glory 

a lowlander cannot be considered ever to have 
seen water at all. The mantling of the pools 
in the rock shadows, with the golden flakes of 
light sinking down through them like falling 
leaves, the ringing of the thin currents among 
the shallows, the flash and the cloud of the 
cascade, the earthquake and foam-fire of the 
cataract, the long lines of alternate mirror and 
mist that lull the imagery of the hills reversed 
in the blue of morning, — all these things belong 
to those hills as their undivided inheritance. 

§ 7. To this supremacy in wave and stream is 
joined a no less manifest preeminence in the 
character of trees. It is possible among plains, 
in the species of trees which properly belong to 
them, the poplars of Amiens, for instance, to 
obtain a serene simplicity of grace, which, as I 
said, is a better help to the study of graceful- 
ness, as such, than any of the wilder groupings 
of the hills ; so also, there are certain condi- 
tions of symmetrical luxuriance developed in 
the park and avenue, rarely rivalled in their way 
among mountains ; and yet the mountain supe- 
riority in foliage is, on the whole, nearly as com- 
plete as it is in water; for exactly as there are 
some expressions in the broad reaches of a navi- 
gable lowland river, such as the Loire or Thames, 
not, in their way, to be matched among the 
rock rivers, and yet for all that a lowlander can- 
not be said to have truly seen the element of 

65 



John Ruskin 

water at all; so even in his richest parks and 
avenues he cannot be said to have truly seen 
trees. For the resources of trees are not devel- 
oped until they have difficulty to contend with; 
neither their tenderness of brotherly love and 
harmony, till they are forced to choose their 
ways of various life where there is contracted 
room for them, talking to each other with 
their restrained branches. The various ac- 
tion of trees rooting themselves in inhospitable 
rocks, stooping to look into ravines, hiding 
from the search of glacier winds, reaching forth 
to the rays of rare sunshine, crowding down to- 
gether to drink at sweetest streams, climbing 
hand in hand among the difficult slopes, open- 
ing in sudden dances round the mossy knolls, 
gathering into companies at rest among the fra- 
grant fields, gliding in grave procession over 
the heavenward ridges, — nothing of this can 
be conceived among the unvexed and unvaried 
felicities of the lowland forest : while to all these 
direct sources of greater beauty are added, first 
the power of redundance, — the mere quantity 
of foliage visible in the folds and on the pro- 
montories of a single Alp being greater than 
that of an entire lowland landscape (unless a 
view from some cathedral tower) ; and to this 
charm of redundance, that of clearer visibil- 
ity, — tree after tree being constantly shown in 
successive height, one behind another, instead 
66 



The Mountain Glory 

of the mere tops and flanks of masses, as in the 
plains; and the forms of multitudes of them 
continually defined against the clear sky, near 
and above, or against white clouds entangled 
among their branches, instead of being con- 
fused in dimness of distance. 

§ 8. Finally, to this supremacy in foliage we 
have to add the still less questionable suprem- 
acy in clouds. There is no effect of sky possi- 
ble in the lowlands which may not in equal 
perfection be seen among the hills ; but there 
are effects by tens of thousands, forever invisi- 
ble and inconceivable to the inhabitant of the 
plains, manifested among the hills in the course 
of one day. The mere power of familiarity 
with the clouds, of walking with them and above 
them, alters and renders clear our whole con- 
ception of the baseless architecture of the sky ; 
and for the beauty of it, there is more in a single 
wreath of early cloud, pacing its way up an 
avenue of pines, or pausing among the points 
of their fringes, than in all the white heaps that 
fill the arched sky of the plains from one horizon 
to the other. And of the nobler cloud mani- 
festations, — the breaking of their troublous seas 
against the crags, their black spray sparkling 
with lightning ; or the going forth of the morn- 
ing along their pavements of moving marble, 
level-laid between dome and dome of snow; — 
of these things there can be as little imagina- 

6 7 



John Ruskin 

tion or understanding in an inhabitant of the 
plains as of the scenery of another planet than 
his own. 

5 9. And, observe, all these superiorities are 
matters plainly measurable and calculable, not 
in any wise to be referred to estimate of sensa- 
tion. Of the grandeur or expression of the hills 
I have not spoken; how far they are great, or 
strong, or terrible, I do not for the moment 
consider, because vastness, and strength, and 
terror, are not to all minds subjects of desired 
contemplation. It may make no difference to 
some men whether a natural object be large or 
small, whether it be strong or feeble. But love- 
liness of color, perfectness of form, endlessness 
of change, wonderfulness of structure, are pre- 
cious to all undiseased human minds ; and the 
superiority of the mountains in all these things 
to the lowland is, I repeat, as measurable as 
the richness of a painted window matched with 
a white one, or the wealth of a museum com- 
pared with that of a simply furnished chamber. 
They seem to have been built for the human 
race, as at once their schools and cathedrals; 
full of treasures of illuminated manuscript for 
the scholar, kindly in simple lessons to the 
worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, 
glorious in holiness for the worshipper. And 
of these great cathedrals of the earth, with their 
gates of rock, pavements of cloud, choirs of 
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The Mountain Glory 

stream and stone, altars of snow, and vaults of 
purple traversed by the continual stars,— of 
these, as we have seen, it was written, nor long 
ago, by one of the best of the poor human race 
for whom they were built, wondering in himself 
for whom their Creator could have made them, 
and thinking to have entirely discerned the Di- 
vine intent in them — " They are inhabited by 
the Beasts." 

§ 10. Was it then indeed thus with us, and 
so lately ? Had mankind offered no worship in 
their mountain churches ? Was all that granite 
sculpture and floral painting done by the angels 
in vain ? 

Not so. It will need no prolonged thought 
to convince us that in the hills the purposes of 
their Maker have indeed been accomplished in 
such measure as, through the sin or folly of 
men, He ever permits them to be accomplished. 
It may not seem, from the general language 
held concerning them, or from any directly 
traceable results, that mountains have had se- 
rious influence on human intellect ; but it will 
not, I think, be difficult to show that their occult 
influence has been both constant and essential 
to the progress of the race. 



69 



Venice 



Venice 

5 i. In the olden days of travelling, now to 
return no more, in which distance could not be 
vanquished without toil, but in which that toil 
was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate 
survey of the countries through which the jour- 
ney lay, and partly by the happiness of the 
evening hours, when, from the top of the last 
hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the 
quiet village where he was to rest, scattered 
among the meadows beside its valley stream ; 
or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty 
perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first 
time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the 
rays of sunset — hours of peaceful and thought- 
ful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in 
the railway station is perhaps not always, or to 
all men, an equivalent — in those days, I say, 
when there was something more to be antici- 
pated and remembered in the first aspect of 

73 



John Ruskin 

each successive halting-place, than a new ar- 
rangement of glass roofing and iron girder, 
there were few moments of which the recollec- 
tion was more fondly cherished by the travel- 
ler than that which brought him within sight 
of Venice, as his gondola shot into the open 
lagoon from the canal of Mestre. Not but 
that the aspect of the city itself was generally 
the source of some slight disappointment, for, 
seen in this direction, its buildings are far 
less characteristic than those of the other great 
towns of Italy ; but this inferiority was partly 
disguised by distance, and more than atoned 
for by the strange rising of its walls and towers 
out of the midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea, 
for it was impossible that the mind or the eye 
could at once comprehend the shallowness of 
the vast sheet of water which stretched away in 
leagues of rippling lustre to the north and south, 
or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to 
the east. The salt breeze, the white moaning 
sea-birds, the masses of black weed separating 
and disappearing gradually, in knots of heaving 
shoal, under the advance of the steady tide, all 
proclaimed it to be indeed the ocean on whose 
bosom the great city rested so calmly ; not such 
blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Nea- 
politan promontories, or sleeps beneath the 
marble rocks of Genoa, but a sea with the bleak 
power of our own northern waves, yet subdued 
74 



Venice 

into a strange spacious rest, and changed from 
its angry pallor into a field of burnished gold, as 
the sun declined behind the belfry tower of the 
lonely island church, fitly named "St. George 
of the Seaweed. ,J As the boat drew nearer to the 
city, the coast which the traveller had just left 
sank behind him into one long, low, sad-colored 
line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and wil- 
lows : but, at what seemed its northern extrem- 
ity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of 
purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage 
of the lagoon ; two or three smooth surges of 
inferior hill extended themselves about their 
roots, and beyond these, beginning with the 
craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the 
Alps girded the whole horizon to the north — 
a wall of jagged blue, here and there showing 
through its clefts a wilderness of misty preci- 
pices, fading far back into the recesses of Ca- 
dore, and itself rising and breaking away east- 
ward, where the sun struck opposite upon its 
snow, into mighty fragments of peaked light, 
standing up behind the barred clouds of even- 
ing, one after another, countless, the crown of 
the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from 
pursuing them, to rest upon the nearer burning 
of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great 
city, where it magnified itself along the waves, 
as the quick silent pacing of the gondola drew 
nearer and nearer. And at last, when its walls 

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John Ruskin 

were reached, and the outmost of its untrodden 
streets was entered, not through towered gate 
or guarded rampart, but as a deep inlet between 
two rocks of coral in the Indian sea ; when first 
upon the traveller's sight opened the long 
ranges of columned palaces, — each with its 
black boat moored at the portal, — each with its 
image cast down, beneath its feet, upon that 
green pavement which every breeze broke into 
new fantasies of rich tessellation; when first, at 
the extremity of the bright vista, the shadowy 
Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from 
behind the palace of the Camerlenghi; that 
strange curve, so delicate, so adamantine, 
strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow 
just bent ; when first, before its moonlight cir- 
cumference was all risen, the gondolier's cry, 
" Ah ! Stall," struck sharp upon the ear, and 
the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices 
that half met over the narrow canal, where the 
plash of the water followed close and loud, ring- 
ing along the marble by the boat's side; and 
when at last that boat darted forth upon the 
breadth of silver sea, across which the front 
of the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine 
veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of 
Salvation, it was no marvel that the mind should 
be so deeply entranced by the visionary charm 
of a scene so beautiful and so strange, as to for- 
get the darker truths of its history and its being. 

7 6 



'Venice 

Well might it seem that such a city had owed 
her existence rather to the rod of the enchanter, 
than the fear of the fugitive ; that the waters 
which encircled her had been chosen for the 
mirror of her state, rather than the shelter of 
her nakedness ; and that all which in nature 
was wild or merciless, — Time and Decay, as 
well as the waves and tempests, — had been won 
to adorn her instead of to destroy, and might 
still spare, for ages to come, that beauty which 
seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of 
the hour-glass as well as of the sea". 

§ II. And although the last few eventful years, 
fraught with change to the face of the whole 
earth, have been more fatal in their influence 
on Venice than the five hundred that preceded 
them ; though the noble landscape of approach 
to her can now be seen no more, or seen only 
by a glance, as the engine slackens its rushing 
on the iron line; and though many of her 
palaces are for ever defaced, and many in dese- 
crated ruins, there is still so much of magic in 
her aspect, that the hurried traveller, who 
must leave her before the wonder of that first 
aspect has been worn away, may still be led to 
forget the humility of her origin, and to shut 
his eyes to the depth of her desolation. They, 
at least, are little to be envied, in whose hearts 
the great charities of the imagination lie dead, 
and for whom the fancy has no power to re- 

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John Ruskin 

press the importunity of painful impressions, or 
to raise what is ignoble, and disguise what is 
discordant, in a scene so rich in its remem- 
brances, so surpassing in its beauty. But for 
this work of the imagination there must be no 
permission during the task which is before us. 
The impotent feelings of romance, so singularly 
characteristic of this century, may indeed gild, 
but never save the remains of those mightier 
ages to which they are attached like climbing 
flowers ; and they must be torn away from the 
magnificent fragments, if we would see them as 
they stood in their own strength. Those feel- 
ings, always as fruitless as they are fond, are in 
Venice not only incapable of protecting, but 
even of discerning, the objects to which they 
ought to have been attached. The Venice of 
modern fiction and drama is a thing of yester- 
day, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage 
dream which the first ray of daylight must dis- 
sipate into dust. No prisoner, whose name is 
worth remembering, or whose sorrow deserved 
sympathy, ever crossed that "Bridge of Sighs," 
which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of 
Venice ; no great merchant of Venice ever saw 
that Rialto under which the traveller now passes 
with breathless interest : the statue which By- 
ron makes Faliero address as of one of his 
great ancestors was erected to a soldier of for- 
tune a hundred and fifty years after Faliero's 



Venice 

death ; and the most conspicuous parts of the 
city have been so entirely altered in the course 
of the last three centuries, that if Henry Dan- 
dolo or Francis Foscari could be summoned 
from their tombs, and stood each on the deck 
of his galley at the entrance of the Grand Canal, 
that renowned entrance, the painter's favorite 
subject, the novelist's favorite scene, where the 
water first narrows by the steps of the Church 
of La Salute, — the mighty Doges would not 
know in what spot of the world they stood, would 
literally not recognize one stone of the great 
city, for whose sake, and by whose ingratitude, 
their grey hairs had been brought down with 
bitterness to the grave. The remains of their 
Venice lie hidden behind the cumbrous masses 
which were the delight of the nation in its do- 
tage ; hidden in many a grass-grown court, and 
silent pathway, and lightless canal, where the 
slow waves have sapped their foundations for 
five hundred years, and must soon prevail over 
them for ever. It must be our task to glean and 
gather them forth, and restore out of them some 
faint image of the lost city, more gorgeous a 
thousand-fold than that which now exists, yet 
not created in the day-dream of the prince, nor 
by the ostentation of the noble, but built by 
iron hands and patient hearts, contending 
against the adversity of nature and the fury 
of man, so that its wonderfulness cannot be 

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John Ruskin 

grasped by the indolence of imagination, but 
only after frank inquiry into the true nature of 
that wild and solitary scene, whose restless tides 
and trembling sands did indeed shelter the 
birth of the city, but long denied her dominion. 
§ ill. When the eye falls casually on a map 
of Europe, there is no feature by which it is 
more likely to be arrested than the strange 
sweeping loop formed by the junction of the 
Alps and Apennines, and enclosing the great 
basin of Lombardy. This return of the moun- 
tain chain upon itself causes a vast difference in 
the character of the distribution of its debris on 
its opposite sides. The rock fragments and 
sediment which the torrents on the north side 
of the Alps bear into the plains are distributed 
over a vast extent of country, and, though here 
and there lodged in beds of enormous thick- 
ness, soon permit the firm substrata to appear 
from underneath them; but all the torrents 
which descend from the southern side of the 
High Alps, and from the northern slope of the 
Apennines, meet concentrically in the recess or 
mountain bay which the two ridges enclose; 
every fragment which thunder breaks out of 
their battlements, and every grain of dust which 
the summer rain washes from their pastures, is 
at last laid at rest in the blue sweep of the Lorn- 
bardic plain; and that plain must have risen 
within its rocky barriers as a cup fills with wine, 
80 



Venice 

but for two contrary influences which continu- 
ally depress, or disperse from its surface, the 
accumulation of the ruins of ages. 

§ IV. I will not tax the reader's faith in mod- 
ern science by insisting on the singular depres- 
sion of the surface of Lombardy, which appears 
for many centuries to have taken place steadily 
and continually; the main fact with which we 
have to do is the gradual transport, by the Po 
and its great collateral rivers, of vast masses of 
the finer sediment to the sea. The character 
of the Lombardic plains is most strikingly ex- 
pressed by the ancient walls of its cities, com- 
posed for the most part of large rounded Alpine 
pebbles alternating with narrow courses of 
brick ; and was curiously illustrated in 1848, by 
the ramparts of these same pebbles thrown up 
four or five feet high round every field, to check 
the Austrian cavalry in the battle under the 
walls of Verona. The finer dust among which 
these pebbles are dispersed is taken up by the 
rivers, fed into continual strength by the Alpine 
snow, so that, however pure their waters may 
be when they issue from the lakes at the foot of 
the great chain, they become of the color and 
opacity of clay before they reach the Adriatic - r 
the sediment which they bear is at once thrown 
down as they enter the sea, forming a vast belt 
of low land along the eastern coast of Italy. 
The powerful stream of the Po of course builds 
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John Ruskin 

forward the fastest ; on each side of it, north 
and south, there is a tract of marsh, fed by 
more feeble streams, and less liable to rapid 
change than the delta of the central river. In 
one of these tracts is built Ravenna, and in 
the other Venice. 

§ v. What circumstances directed the pecu- 
liar arrangement of this great belt of sediment 
in the earliest times, it is not here the place to 
inquire. It is enough for us to know that from 
the mouths of the Adige to those of the Piave 
there stretches, at a variable distance of from 
three to five miles from the actual shore, a 
bank of sand, divided into long islands by nar- 
row channels of sea. The space between this 
bank and the true shore consists of the sedi- 
mentary deposits from these and other rivers, a 
great plain of calcareous mud, covered, in the 
neighborhood of Venice, by the sea at high 
water, to the depth in most p'aces of a foot or a 
foot and a half, and nearly everywhere exposed 
at low tide, but divided by an intricate network 
of narrow and winding channels, from which 
the sea never retires. In some places, accord- 
ing to the run of the currents, the land has 
risen into marshy islets, consolidated, some by 
art, and some by time, into ground firm enough 
to be built upon, or fruitful enough to be culti- 
vated : in others, on the contrary, it has not 
reached the sea-level; so that, at the average 
82 



Venice 

low water, shallow lakelets glitter among its 
irregularly exposed fields of seaweed. In the 
midst of the largest of these, increased in im- 
portance by the confluence of several large 
river channels towards one of the openings in 
the sea bank, the city of Venice itself is built, 
on a crowded cluster of islands; the various 
plots of higher ground which appear to the 
north and south of this central cluster, have at 
different periods been also thickly inhabited, and 
now bear, according to their size, the remains 
of cities, villages, or isolated convents and 
churches, scattered among spaces of open 
ground, partly waste and encumbered by ruins, 
partly under cultivation for the supply of the 
metropolis. 

§ VI. The average rise and fall of the tide is 
about three feet (varying considerably with the 
seasons) ; but this fall, on so flat a shore, is 
enough to cause continual movement in the 
waters, and in the main canals to produce a re- 
flux which frequently runs like a mill stream. 
At high water no land is visible for many miles 
to the north or south of Venice, except in the 
form of small islands crowned with towers or 
gleaming with villages : there is a channel, 
some three miles wide, between the city and 
the mainland, and some mile and a half wide 
between it and the sandy breakwater called the 
Lido, which divides the lagoon from the Adri- 

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John Ruskin 

atic, but which is so low as hardly to disturb 
the impression of the city's having been built in 
the midst of the ocean, although the secret of 
its true position is partly, yet not painfully, be- 
trayed by the clusters of piles set to mark the 
deep-water channels, which undulate far away 
in spotty chains like the studded backs of huge 
sea-snakes, and by the quick glittering of the 
crisped and crowded waves that flicker and 
dance before the strong winds upon the unlifted 
level of the shallow sea. But the scene is widely 
different at low tide. A fall of eighteen or 
twenty inches is enough to show ground over 
the greater part of the lagoon ; and at the com- 
plete ebb the city is seen standing in the midst 
of a dark plain of seaweed, of gloomy green, 
except only where the larger branches of the 
Brenta and its associated streams converge to- 
wards the port of the Lido. Through this salt 
and sombre plain the gondola and the fishing- 
boat advance by tortuous channels, seldom 
more than four or five feet deep, and often 
so choked with slime that the heavier keels 
furrow the bottom till their crossing tracks 
are seen through the clear sea water like the 
ruts upon a wintry road, and the oar leaves 
blue gashes upon the ground at every stroke, 
or is entangled among the thick weed that 
fringes the banks with the weight of its sullen 
waves, leaning to and fro upon the uncertain 

8 4 



Venice 

sway of the exhausted tide. The scene is often 
profoundly oppressive, even at this day, when 
every plot of higher ground bears some frag- 
ment of fair building: but, in order to know 
what it was once, let the traveller follow in his 
boat at evening the windings of some unfre- 
quented channel far into the midst of the 
melancholy plain ; let him remove, in his im- 
agination, the brightness of the great city that 
still extends itself in the distance, and the walls 
and towers from the islands that are near; and 
so wait, until the bright investiture and sweet 
warmth of the sunset are withdrawn from the 
waters, and the black desert of their shore lies in 
its nakedness beneath the night, pathless, com- 
fortless, infirm, lost in dark languor and fearful 
silence, except where the salt runlets plash into 
the tideless pools, or the sea-birds flit from their 
margins with a questioning cry ; and he will be 
enabled to enter in some sort into the horror 
of heart with which this solitude was anciently 
chosen by man for his habitation. They little 
thought, who first drove the stakes into the 
sand, and strewed the ocean reeds for their rest, 
that their children were to be the princes of 
that ocean, and their palaces its pride ; and yet, 
in the great natural laws that rule that sorrow- 
ful wilderness, let it be remembered what 
strange preparation had been made for the 
things which no human imagination could have 

85 



John Ruskin 

foretold, and how the whole existence and for- 
tune of the Venetian nation were anticipated or 
compelled, by the setting of those bars and 
doors to the rivers and the sea. Had deeper 
currents divided their islands, hostile navies 
would again and again have reduced the rising 
city into servitude ; had stronger surges beaten 
their shores, all the richness and refinement of 
the Venetian architecture must have been ex- 
changed for the walls and bulwarks of an ordi- 
nary sea-port. Had there been no tide, as in 
other parts of the Mediterranean, the narrow 
canals of the city would have become noisome, 
and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. 
Had the tide been only a foot or eighteen 
inches higher in its rise, the water-access to the 
doors of the palaces would have been impossi- 
ble : even as it is, there is sometimes a little 
difficulty, at the ebb, in landing without setting 
foot upon the lower and slippery steps : and the 
highest tides sometimes enter the courtyards, 
and overflow the entrance halls. Eighteen 
inches more of difference between the level of 
the flood and ebb would have rendered the 
doorsteps of every palace, at low water, a treach- 
erous mass of weeds and limpets, and the entire 
system of water-carriage for the higher classes, 
in their easy and daily intercourse, must have 
been done away with. The streets of the city 
would have been widened, its network of canals 
86 



Venice 

filled up, and all the peculiar character of the 
place and the people destroyed. 

§ VII. The reader may perhaps have felt some 
pain in the contrast between this faithful view 
of the site of the Venetian Throne, and the ro- 
mantic conception of it which we ordinarily 
form; but this pain, if he have felt it, ought to 
be more than counterbalanced by the value of 
the instance thus afforded to us at once of the 
inscrutableness and the wisdom of the ways of 
God. If, two thousand years ago, we had been 
permitted to watch the slow settling of the slime 
of those turbid rivers into the polluted sea, and 
the gaining upon its deep and fresh waters of 
the lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, 
how little could we have understood the pur- 
pose with which those islands were shaped out 
of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed with 
their desolate walls of sand ! How little could 
we have known, any more than of what now 
seems to us most distressful, dark, and object- 
less, the glorious aim which was then in the 
mind of Him in whose hand are all the corners 
of the earth ! how little imagined that in the 
laws which were stretching forth the gloomy 
margins of those fruitless banks, and feeding 
the bitter grass among their shallows, there was 
indeed a preparation, and the only preparation 
possible, for the founding of a city which was to 
be set like a golden clasp on the girdle of the 
8? 



John Ruskin 

earth, to write her history on the white scrolls 
of the sea-surges, and to word it in their thun- 
der, and to gather and give forth, in world- 
wide pulsation, the glory of the West and of 
the East, from the burning heart of her Forti- 
tude and Splendor. 



88 



St. Mark's 



St. Mark's 



§ X. And now I wish that the reader, before I 
bring him into St. Mark's Place, would imagine 
himself for a little time in a quiet English cathe- 
dral town, and walk with me to the west front of its 
cathedral. Let us go together up the more retired 
street, at the end of which we can see the pin- 
nacles of one of the towers, and then through 
the low grey gateway, with its battlemented top 
and small latticed window in the centre, into 
the inner private-looking road or close, where 
nothing goes in but the carts of th^ tradesmen 
who supply the bishop and the chapter, and 
where there are little shaven grass-plots, fenced 
in by neat rails, before old-fashioned groups of 
somewhat diminutive and excessively trim 
houses, with little oriel and bay windows jutting 
out here and there, and deep wooden cornices 
and eaves painted cream color and white, and 
small porches to their doors in the shape of 
cockle-shells, or little, crooked, thick, inde- 

9 1 



John Ruskin 

scribable wooden gables warped a little on one 
side ; and so forward till we come to larger 
houses, also old-fashioned, but of red brick, 
and with gardens behind them, and fruit walls, 
which show here and there, among the necta- 
rines, the vestiges of an old cloister arch or 
shaft, and looking in front on the cathedral 
square itself, laid out in rigid division of 
smooth grass and gravel walk, yet not uncheer- 
ful, especially on the sunny side where the 
canons' children are walking with their nursery- 
maids. And so, taking care not to tread on 
the grass, we will go along the straight walk to 
the west front, and there stand for a time, look- 
ing up at its deep-pointed porches and the 
dark places between their pillars where there 
were statues once, and where the fragments, 
here and there, of a stately figure are still left, 
which has in it the likeness of a king, perhaps 
indeed a king on earth, perhaps a saintly king 
long ago in heaven ; and so higher and higher 
up to the great mouldering wall of rugged sculp- 
ture and confused arcades, shattered, and grey, 
and grisly with heads of dragons and mocking 
fiends, worn by the rain and swirling winds into 
yet unseemlier shape, and colored on their 
stony scales by the deep russet-orange lichen, 
melancholy gold; and so, higher still, to the 
bleak towers, so far above that the eye loses 
itself among the bosses of their traceries, 
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St. Mark's 

though they are rude and strong, and only 
sees like a drift of eddying black points, now 
closing, now scattering, and now settling sud- 
denly into invisible places among the bosses 
and flowers, the crowd of restless birds that fill 
the whole square with that strange clangor of 
theirs, so harsh and yet so soothing, like the 
cries of birds on a solitary coast between the 
cliffs and sea. 

§ XI. Think for a little while of that scene, 
and the meaning of all its small formalisms, 
mixed with its serene sublimity. Estimate its 
secluded, continuous, drowsy felicities, and its 
evidence of the sense and steady performance 
of such kind of duties as can be regulated by 
the cathedral clock; and weigh the influence 
of those dark towers on all who have passed 
through the lonely square at their feet for cen- 
turies, and on all who have seen them rising far 
away over the wooded plain, or catching on 
their square masses the last rays of the sunset, 
when the city at their feet was indicated only 
by the mist at the bend of the river. And then 
let us quickly recollect that we are in Venice, 
and land at the extremity of the Calle Lunga 
San Moise, which may be considered as there 
answering to the secluded street that led us to 
our English cathedral gateway. 

§ XII. We find ourselves in a paved alley, 
some seven feet wide where it is widest, full 

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John Ruskin 

of people, and resonant with cries of itinerant 
salesmen, — a shriek in their beginning, and 
dying away into a kind of brazen ringing, all 
the worse for its confinement between the high 
houses of the passage along which we have to 
make our way. Over-head an extricable con- 
fusion of rugged shutters, and iron balconies 
and chimney flues pushed out on brackets to 
save room, and arched windows with projecting 
sills of Istrian stone, and gleams of green leaves 
here and there where a fig-tree branch escapes 
over a lower wall from some inner cortile, lead- 
ing the eye up to the narrow stream of blue sky 
high over all. On each side, a row of shops, 
as densely set as may be, occupying, in fact, 
intervals between the square stone shafts, about 
eight feet high, which carry the first floors: in- 
tervals of which one is narrow and serves as a 
door; the other is, in the more respectable 
shops, wainscoted to the height of the counter 
and glazed above, but in those of the poorer 
tradesmen left open to the ground, and the 
wares laid on benches and tables in the open 
air, the light in all cases entering at the front 
only, and fading away in a few feet from the 
threshold into a gloom which the eye from 
without cannot penetrate, but which is gener- 
ally broken by a ray or two from a feeble lamp 
at the back of the shop, suspended before a 
print of the Virgin. The less pious shopkeeper 

94 



St. Mark's 

sometimes leaves his lamp unlighted, and is 
contented with a penny print; the more reli- 
gious one has his print colored and set in a little 
shrine with a gilded or figured fringe, with per- 
haps a faded flower or two on each side, and his 
lamp burning brilliantly. Here at the fruiterer's, 
where the dark-green water-melons are heaped 
upon the counter like cannon balls, the Ma- 
donna has a tabernacle of fresh laurel leaves ; 
but the pewterer next door has let his lamp out, 
and there is nothing to be seen in his shop but 
the dull gleam of the studded patterns on the 
copper pans, hanging from his roof in the dark- 
ness. Next comes a " Vendita Frittole e 
Liquori," where the Virgin, enthroned in a 
very humble manner beside a tallow candle on 
a back shelf, presides over certain ambrosial 
morsels of a nature too ambiguous to be defined 
or enumerated. But a few steps farther on, at 
the regular wine-shop of the calle, where we are 
offered "Vino Nostrani a Soldi 28-32," the 
Madonna is in great glory, enthroned above ten 
or a dozen large red casks of three-year-old 
vintage, and flanked by goodly ranks of bottles 
of Maraschino, and two crimson lamps; and 
for the evening, when the gondoliers will come 
to drink out, under her auspices, the money they 
have gained during the day, she will have a 
whole chandelier. 

$ XIII. A yard or two farther, we pass the 

95 



John Ruskin 

hostelry of the Black Eagle, and, glancing as 
we pass through the square door of marble, 
deeply moulded, in the outer wall, we see the 
shadows of its pergola of vines resting on an 
ancient well, with a pointed shield carved on its 
side ; and so presently emerge on the bridge 
and Campo San Moise, whence to the entrance 
into St. Mark's Place, called the Bocca di Piazza 
(mouth of the square), the Venetian character is 
nearly destroyed, first by the frightful facade of 
San Moise, which we will pause at another time to 
examine, and then by the modernizing of the 
shops as they near the piazza, and the mingling 
with the lower Venetian populace of lounging 
groups of English and Austrians. We will push 
fast through them into the shadow of the pillars at 
the end of the •' Bocca di Piazza," and then we 
forget them all : for between those pillars there 
opens a great light, and, in the midst of it, as 
we advance slowly, the vast tower of St. Mark 
seems to lift itself visibly forth from the level 
field of chequered stones ; and, on each side, 
the countless arches prolong themselves into 
ranged symmetry, as if the rugged and irregular 
houses that pressed together above us in the 
dark alley had been struck back into sudden 
obedience and lovely order, and all their rude 
casements and broken walls had been trans- 
formed into arches charged with goodly sculp- 
ture, and fluted shafts of delicate stone. 

9 6 



St. Mark's 

§ XIV. And well may they fall back, for be- 
yond those troops of ordered arches there rises 
a vision out of the earth, and all the great 
square seems to have opened from it in a kind 
of awe, that we may see it far away ; — a mul- 
titude of pillars and white domes, clustered into 
a long low pyramid of colored light ; a trea- 
sure-heap, it seems, partly of gold, and partly 
of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath 
into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair 
mosaic, and beset with sculpture of alabaster, 
clear as amber and delicate as ivory, — sculpture 
fantastic and involved, of palm leaves and lilies, 
and grapes and pomegranates, and birds cling- 
ing and fluttering among the branches, all 
twined together into an endless network of 
buds and plumes ; and, in the midst of it, the 
solemn forms of angels, sceptred, and robed to 
the feet, and leaning to each other across the 
gates, their figures indistinct among the gleam- 
ing of the golden ground through the leaves 
beside them, interrupted and dim, like the 
morning light as it faded back among the 
branches of Eden, when first its gates were 
angel-guarded long ago. And round the walls 
of the porches there are set pillars of variegated 
stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green 
serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and 
marbles, that half refuse and half yield to the 
sunshine, Cleopatra-like, " their bluest veins to 

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John Ruskin 

kiss " — the shadow, as it steals back from them, 
revealing line after line of azure undulation, as 
a receding tide leaves the waved sand; their 
capitals rich with interwoven tracery, rooted 
knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acan- 
thus and vine, and mystical signs, all beginning 
and ending in the Cross ; and above them, in the 
broad archivolts, a continuous chain of language 
and of life — angels, and the signs of heaven, 
and the labors of men, each in its appointed 
season upon the earth ; and above these, an- 
other range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with 
white arches edged with scarlet flowers, — a 
confusion of delight, amidst which the breasts 
of the Greek horses are seen blazing in their 
breadth of golden strength, and the St Mark's 
Lion, lifted on a blue field covered with stars, 
until at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the 
arches break into a marble foam, and toss them- 
selves far into the blue sky in flashes and 
wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers 
on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before 
they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them 
with coral and amethyst. 

Between that grim cathedral of England and 
this, what an interval ! There is a type of it in 
the very birds that haunt them ; for, instead of 
the restless crowd, hoarse-voiced and sable- 
winged, drifting on the bleak upper air, the St. 
Mark's porches are full of doves, that nestle 
9 8 



St. Mark's 

among the marble foliage, and mingle the soft 
iridescence of their living plumes, changing at 
every motion, with the tints, hardly less lovely, 
that have stood unchanged for seven hundred 
years. 

§ XV. And what effect has this splendor on 
those who pass beneath it ? You may walk 
from sunrise to sunset, to and fro, before the 
gateway of St. Mark's, and you will not see an 
eye lifted to it, nor a countenance brightened 
by it. Priest and layman, soldier and civilian, 
rich and poor, pass by it alike regardlessly. 
Up to the very recesses of the porches, the 
meanest tradesmen of the city push their coun- 
ters ; nay, the foundations of its pillars are them- 
selves the seats — not " of them that sell doves " 
for sacrifice, but of the vendors of toys and cari- 
catures. Round the whole square in front of 
the church there is almost a continuous line of 
cafes, where the idle Venetians of the middle 
classes lounge, and read empty journals ; in its 
centre the Austrian bands play during the time 
of vespers, their martial music jarring with the 
organ notes, — the march drowning the mis- 
erere, and the sullen crowd thickening round 
them, — a crowd, which, if it had its will, would 
stiletto every soldier that pipes to it. And in 
the recesses of the porches, all day long, knots 
of men of the lowest classes, unemployed and 
listless, lie basking in the sun like lizards ; and 

99 



John Ruskin 

unregarded children, — every heavy glance of 
their young eyes full of desperation and stony 
depravity, and their throats hoarse with cursing, 
— gamble, and fight, and snarl, and sleep, 
hour after hour, clashing their bruised cen- 
tesimi upon the marble ledges of the church 
porch. And the images of Christ and His 
angels look down upon it continually. 



IOC 



Art and Morals 



Art and Morals 



You probably recollect that, in the beginning 1 
of my last lecture, it was stated that fine art 
had, and could have, but three functions : the 
enforcing of the religious sentiments of men, 
the perfecting their ethical state, and the doing 
them material service. We have to-day to ex- 
amine the mode of its action in the second 
power, that of perfecting the morality or ethical 
state of men. 

Perfecting, observe — not producing. 

You must have the right moral state first, or 
you cannot have the art. But when the art is 
once obtained, its reflected action enhances and 
completes the moral state out of which it arose, 
and, above all, communicates the exaltation to 
other minds which are already morally capable 
of the like. 

For instance, take the art of singing, and the 

simplest perfect master of it, (up to the limits 

of his nature) whom you can find — a skylark. 

From him you may learn what it is to " sing for 

103 



John Ruskin 

joy." You must get the moral state first, the 
pure gladness, then give it finished expression; 
and it is perfected in itself, and made communi- 
cable to other creatures capable of such joy. 
But it is incommunicable^o those who are not 
prepared to receive it. 

Now, all right human song is, 'similarly, 
the finished expression, by art, of the joy or 
grief of noble persons, for right causes. And 
accurately in proportion to the Tightness of the 
cause, and purity of the emotion, is the possi- 
bility of the fine art. A maiden may sing of 
her lost love, but a miser cannot sing of his lost 
money. And with absolute precision from 
highest to lowest, the fineness of the possible 
art is an index of the moral purity and majesty 
of the emotion it expresses. You may test it 
practically at any instant. Question with your- 
selves respecting any feeling that has taken 
strong possession of your mind, " Could this be 
sung by a master, and sung nobly, with a true 
melody and art ? " Then it is a right feeling. 
Could it not be sung at all, or only sung ludi- 
crously ? It is a base one. And that is so in all 
the arts ; so that with mathematical precision, 
subject to no error or exception, the art of a 
nation, so far as it exists, is an exponent of its 
ethical state. 

An exponent, observe, and exalting influ- 
ence ; but not the root or cause. You cannot 
104 



Art and Morals 

paint or sing yourselves into being good men ; 
you must be good men before you can either 
paint or sing, and then the colour and sound 
will complete in you all that is best. 

And this it was that I called upon you to 
hear, saying, " listen to me at least now," in the 
first lecture, namely, that no art-teaching could 
be of use to you, but would rather be harmful, 
unless it was grafted on something deeper than 
all art. For indeed not only with this, of which 
it is my function to show you the laws, but 
much more with the art of all men, which you 
came here chiefly to learn, that of language, 
the chief vices of education have arisen from the 
one great fallacy of supposing that noble lan- 
guage is a communicable trick of grammar and 
accent, instead of simply the careful expression 
of right thought. All the virtues of language 
are, in their roots, moral ; it becomes accurate 
if the speaker desires to be true ; clear, if he 
speaks with sympathy and a desire to be intelli- 
gible ; powerful, if he has earnestness ; pleas- 
ant, if he has sense of rhythm and order. There 
are no other virtues of language producible by 
art than these : but let me mark more deeply 
for an instant the significance of one of them. 
Language, I said, is only clear when it is sym- 
pathetic. You can, in truth, understand a 
man's word only by understanding his temper. 
Your own word is also as of an unknown tongue 
105 



John Ruskin 

to him unless he understands yours. And it is 
this which makes the art of language, if any one 
is to be chosen separately from the rest, that 
which is fittest for the instrument of a gentle- 
man's education. To teach the meaning of a 
word thoroughly is^o teach the nature of the 
spirit that coined 'it; the secret of language is 
the secret of sympathy, and its full charm is 
possible only to the gentle. And thus the prin- 
ciples of beautiful speech have all been fixed by 
sincere and kindly speech. On ,the laws which 
have been determined by sincerity, false speech, 
apparently beautiful, may afterwards be con- 
structed; but all such utterance, whether in 
oration or poetry, is not only without perma- 
nent power, but it is destructive of the principles 
it has usurped. So long as no words are uttered 
but in faithfulness, so long the art of language 
goes on exalting itself; but the moment it is 
shaped and chiselled on external principles, it 
falls into frivolity, and perishes. And this truth 
would have been long ago manifest, had it not 
been that in periods of advanced academical 
science there is always a tendency to deny the 
sincerity of the first masters of language. Once 
learn to write gracefully in the manner of an 
ancient author, and we are apt to think that he 
also wrote in the manner of some one else. 
But no noble nor right style was ever yet 
founded but out of a sincere heart. 
1 06 



Art and Morals 

No man is worth reading to form your style, 
who does not mean what he says ; nor was any 
great style ever invented but by some man who 
meant what he said. Find out the beginner of 
a great manner of writing, and you have also 
found the declarer of some true facts or sincere 
passions; and your whole method of reading 
will thus be quickened, for, being sure that your 
author really meant what he said, you will be 
much more careful to ascertain what it is that 
he means. 

And of yet greater importance is it deeply to 
know that every beauty possessed by the lan- 
guage of a nation is significant of the innermost 
laws of its being. Keep the temper of the peo- 
ple stern and manly; make their associations 
grave, courteous, and for worthy objects ; oc- 
cupy them in just deeds; and their tongue 
must needs be a grand one. Nor is it possible, 
therefore — observe the necessary reflected ac- 
tion — that any tongue should be a noble one, 
of which the words are not so many trumpet- 
calls to action. All great languages invariably 
utter great things, and command them ; they 
cannot be mimicked but by obedience; the 
breath of them is inspiration because it is not 
only vocal, but vital ; and you can only learn 
to speak as these men spoke, by becoming what 
these men were. 

Now for direct confirmation of this, I want 
107 



John Ruskin 

you to think over the relation of expression to 
character in two great masters of the absolute 
art of language, Virgil and Pope. You are 
perhaps surprised at the last name; and indeed 
you have in English much higher grasp and 
melody of language from more passionate 
minds, but you have nothing else, in its range, 
so perfect. I name, therefore, these two men, 
because they are the two most accomplished 
Artists, merely as such, whom I know in litera- 
ture ; and because I think you will be after- 
wards interested in investigating how the infi- 
nite grace in the words of the one, the severity 
in those of the other, and the precision in those 
of both, arise wholly out of the moral elements 
of their minds: — out of the deep tenderness in 
Virgil which enabled him to write the stories 
of Nisus and Lausus; and the serene and just 
benevolence which placed Pope, in his theology, 
two centuries in advance of his time, and en- 
abled him to sum the law of noble life in two 
lines which, so far as I know, are the most com- 
plete, the most concise, and the most lofty 
expression of moral temper existing in English 
words : — 
" Never elated, while one mail's oppress' d / 
Never dejected, while another's blessed" 
I wish you also to remember these lines of Pope, 
and to make yourselves entirely masters of his 
system of ethics ; because, putting Shakespeare 
1 08 



Art and Morals 

aside as rather the world's than ours, I hold 
Pope to be the most perfect representative we 
have, since Chaucer, of the true English mind ; 
and I think the Dunciad is the most absolutely- 
chiselled and monumental work " exacted " in 
our country. You will find, as you study Pope, 
that he has expressed for you, in the strictest 
language and within the briefest limits, every 
law of art, of criticism, of economy, of policy, 
and, finally, of a benevolence, humble, rational, 
and resigned, contented with its allotted share 
of life, and trusting the problem of its salvation 
to Him in whose hand lies that of the universe. 

And now I pass to the arts with which I have 
special concern, in which, though the facts are 
exactly the same, I shall have more difficulty 
in proving my assertion, because very few of us 
are as cognisant of the merit of painting as we 
are of that of language ; and I can only show you 
whence that merit springs from, after having 
thoroughly shown you in what it consists. But, 
in the meantime, I have simply to tell you, that 
the manual arts are as accurate exponents of 
ethical state, as other modes of expression; 
first, with absolute precision, of that of the 
workman, and then with precision, disguised 
by many distorting influences, of that of the 
nation to which he belongs. 

And, first, they are a perfect exponent of the 
mind of the workman; but, being so, remem- 
109 



John Ruskin 

ber, if the mind be great or complex, the art is 
not an easy book to read; for we must ourselves 
possess all the mental characters of which we are 
to read the signs. No man can read the evi- 
dence of labour who is not himself laborious, 
for he does not know what the work cost : nor 
can he read the evidence of true passion if he 
is not passionate; nor of gentleness if he is not 
gentle : and the most subtle signs of fault and 
weakness of character he can only judge by 
having had the same faults to fight with. I 
myself, for instance, know impatient work, and 
tired work, better than most critics, because I 
am myself always impatient, and often tired: — 
so also, the patient and indefatigable touch of 
a mighty master becomes more wonderful to 
me than to others. Yet, wonderful in no mean 
measure it will be to you all, when I make it 
manifest ; — and as soon as we begin our real 
work, and you have learned what it is to draw 
a true line, I shall be able to make manifest to 
you, — and indisputably so, — that the day's 
work of a man like Mantegna or Paul Veronese 
consists of an unfaltering, uninterrupted succes- 
sion of movements of the hand more precise 
than those of the finest fencer : the pencil leav- 
ing one point and arriving at another, not only 
with unerring precision at the extremity of the 
line, but with an unerring and yet varied course 
— sometimes over spaces a foot or more in ex- 
1 10 



Art and Morals 

tent — yet a course so determined everywhere 
that either of these men could, and Veronese 
often does, draw a finished profile, or any other 
portion of the contour of a face, with one line, 
not afterwards changed. Try, first, to realise 
to yourselves the muscular precision of that 
action, and the intellectual strain of it ; for the 
movement of a fencer is perfect in practised 
monotony ; but the movement of the hand of 
a great painter is at every instant governed by 
direct and new intention. Then imagine that 
muscular firmness and subtlety, and that instan- 
taneously selective and ordinant energy of the 
brain, sustained all day long, not only without 
fatigue, but with a visible joy in the exertion, 
like that which an eagle seems to take in the 
wave of his wings ; and this all life long, and 
through long life, not only without failure of 
power, but with visible increase of it, until the 
actually organic changes of old age. And then 
consider, so far as you know anything of physi- 
ology, what sort of an ethical state of body and 
mind that means! — ethic through ages past! 
what fineness of race there must be to get it, 
what exquisite balance and symmetry of the 
vital powers ! And then, finally, determine for 
yourselves whether a manhood like that is con- 
sistent with any viciousness of soul, with any 
mean anxiety, any gnawing lust, any wretched- 
ness of spite or remorse, any consciousness of 
in 



John Ruskin 

rebellion against law of God or man, or any 
actual, though unconscious, violation of even 
the least law to which obedience is essential for 
the glory of life, and the pleasing of its Giver. 

It is, of course, true that many of the strong 
masters had deep faults of character, but their 
faults always show in their work. It is true that 
some could not govern their passions ; if so, 
they died young, or they painted ill when old. 
But the greater part of our misapprehension in 
the whole matter is from our not having well 
known who the great painters were, and taking 
delight in the petty skill that was bred in the 
fumes of the taverns of the North, instead of 
theirs who breathed empyreal air, sons of the 
morning, under the woods of Assisi and the 
crags of Cadore. 

It is true however also, as I have pointed out 
long ago, that the strong masters fall into two 
great divisions, one leading simple and natural 
lives, the other restrained in a Puritanism of 
the worship of beauty ; and these two manners 
of life you may recognise in a moment by their 
work. Generally the naturalists are the strong- 
est ; but there are two of the Puritans, whose 
work if I can succeed in making clearly under- 
standable to you during my three years here, 
it is all I need care to do. But of these two 
Puritans one I cannot name to you, and the 
other I at present will not. One I cannot, for 
112 



Art and Morals 

no one knows his name, except the baptismal 
one, Bernard, or " dear little Bernard " — Ber- 
nardino, called, from his birthplace, (Luino, on 
the lago Maggiore,) Bernard of Luino. The 
other is a Venetian, of whom many of you prob- 
ably have never heard, and of whom, through 
me, you shall not hear until I have tried to get 
some picture by him over to England. 

Observe then, this Puritanism in the worship 
of beauty, though sometimes weak, is always 
honourable and amiable, and the exact reverse 
of the false Puritanism, which consists in the 
dread or disdain of beauty. And in order to 
treat my subject rightly, I ought to proceed 
from the skill of art to the choice of its subject,, 
and show you how the moral temper of the 
workman is shown by his seeking lovely forms 
and thoughts to express, as well as by the force 
of his hand in expression. But I need not now 
urge this part of the proof on you, because you 
are already, I believe, sufficiently conscious of 
the truth in this matter, and also I have already 
said enough of it in my writings; whereas I 
have not at all said enough of the infallibleness 
of fine technical work as a proof of every other 
good power. And indeed it was long before I 
myself understood the true meaning of the pride 
of the greatest men in their mere execution, 
shown, for a permanent lesson to us, in the 
stories which, whether true or not, indicate with 

113 



John Ruskin 

absolute accuracy the general conviction of 
great artists ; — the stories of the contest of 
Apelles and Protogenes in a line only, (of which 
I can promise you, you shall know the meaning 
to some purpose in a little while), — the story 
of the circle of Giotto, and especially, which 
you may perhaps not have observed, the ex- 
pression of Durer in his inscription on the 
drawings sent him by Raphael. These figures, 
he says, " Raphael drew and sent to Albert 
Durer in Nurnberg, to show him " — What ? 
Not his invention, nor his beauty of expression, 
but "sein Hand zu weisen," "To show him his 
hand" And you will find, as you examine far- 
ther, that all inferior artists are continually try- 
ing to escape from the necessity of sound work, 
and either indulging themselves in their delights 
in subject, or pluming themselves on their noble 
motives for attempting what they cannot per- 
form ; (and observe, by the way, that a great 
deal of what is mistaken for conscientious mo- 
tive is nothing but a very pestilent, because 
very subtle, condition of vanity); whereas the 
great men always understand at once that the 
first morality of a painter, as of everybody else, 
is to know his business ; and so earnest are they 
in this, that many, whose lives you would think, 
by the results of their work, had been passed 
in strong emotion, have in reality subdued 
themselves, though capable of the very strong- 
114 



Art and Morals 

est passions, into a calm as absolute as that of 
a deeply sheltered mountain lake, which reflects 
every agitation of the clouds in the sky, and 
every change of the shadows on the hills, but 
is itself motionless. 

Finally, you must remember that great ob- 
scurity has been brought upon the truth in this 
matter by the want of integrity and simplicity 
in our modern life. I mean integrity in the 
Latin sense, wholeness. Everything is broken 
up, and mingled in confusion, both in our 
habits and thoughts; besides being in great 
part imitative : so that you not only cannot tell 
what a man is, but sometimes you cannot tell 
whether he is, at all ! — whether you have in- 
deed to do with a spirit, or only with an echo. 
And thus the same inconsistencies appear now, 
between the work of artists of merit and their 
personal characters, as those which you find 
continually disappointing expectation in the 
lives of men of modern literary power; — the 
same conditions of society having obscured or 
misdirected the best qualities of the imagina- 
tion, both in our literature and art. Thus there 
is no serious question with any of us as to the 
personal character of Dante and Giotto, of 
Shakespeare and Holbein ; but we pause timidly 
in the attempt to analyse the moral laws of the 
art skill in recent poets, novelists, and painters. 
- Let me assure you once for all, that as you 

"5 



John Ruskin 

grow older, if you enable yourselves to distin- 
guish, by the truth of your own lives, what is 
true in those of other men, you will gradually 
perceive that all good has its origin in good, 
never in evil ; that the fact of either literature 
or painting being truly fine of their kind, what- 
ever their mistaken aim, or partial error, is 
proof of their noble origin : and that, if there 
is indeed sterling value in the thing done, it 
has come of a sterling worth in the soul that did 
it, however alloyed or defiled by conditions of 
sin which are sometimes more appalling or 
more strange than those which all may detect 
in their own hearts, because they are part of a 
personality altogether larger than ours, and as 
far beyond our judgment in its darkness as be- 
yond our following in its light. And it is suf- 
ficient warning against what some might dread 
as the probable effect of such a conviction on 
your own minds, namely, that you might permit 
yourselves in the weaknesses which you ima- 
gined to be allied to genius, when they took the 
form of personal temptations; — -it is surely, I 
say, sufficient warning against so mean a folly, 
to discern, as you may with little pains, that, 
of all human existences, the lives of men of that 
distorted and tainted nobility of intellect are 
probably the most miserable. 

I pass to the second, and for us the more . 
practically important question, What is the 
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Art and Morals 

effect of noble art upon other men ; what has 
it done for national morality in time past; and 
what effect is the extended knowledge or pos- 
session of it likely to have upon us now? And 
here we are at once met by the facts, which are 
as gloomy as indisputable, that, while many 
peasant populations, among whom scarcely the 
rudest practice of art has ever been attempted, 
have lived in comparative innocence, honour, 
and happiness, the worst foulness and cruelty 
of savage tribes have been frequently associated 
with fine ingenuities of decorative design ; also, 
that no people has ever attained the higher 
stages of art skill, except at a period of its civ- 
ilisation which was sullied by frequent, violent, 
and even monstrous crime ; and, lastly, that the 
attaining of perfection in art power, has been 
hitherto, in every nation, the accurate signal 
of the beginning of its ruin. 

Respecting which phenomena, observe first, 
that although good never springs out of evil, it is 
developed to its highest by contention with evil. 
There are some groups of peasantry, in far-away 
nooks of Christian countries, who are nearly as 
innocent as lambs ; but the morality which 
gives power to art is the morality of men, not 
of cattle. 

Secondly, the virtues of the inhabitants of 
many country districts are apparent, not real ; 
their lives are indeed artless, but not innocent; 
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John Ruskin 

and it is only the monotony of circumstances, 
and the absence of temptation, which prevent 
the exhibition of evil passions not less real 
because often dormant, nor less foul because 
shown only in petty faults, or inactive malig- 
nities. 

But you will observe also that absolute artless- 
ness, to men in any kind of moral health, is 
impossible ; they have always, at least, the art 
by which they live — agriculture or seamanship ; 
and in these industries, skilfully practised, you 
will find the law of their moral training ; while, 
whatever the adversity of circumstances, every 
rightly-minded peasantry, such as that of Swe- 
den, Denmark, Bavaria, or Switzerland, has 
associated with its needful industry a quite 
studied school of pleasurable art in dress; and 
generally also in song, and simple domestic 
architecture. 

Again, I need not repeat to you here what I 
endeavoured to explain in the first lecture in 
the book I called "The Two Paths," respecting 
the arts of savage races: but I may now note 
briefly that such arts are the result of an intel- 
lectual activity which has found no room to 
expand, and which the tyranny of nature or of 
man has condemned to disease through arrested 
growth. And where neither Christianity, nor 
any other religion conveying some moral help, 
has reached, the animal energy of such races 
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Art and Morals 

necessarily flames into ghastly conditions of 
evil, and the grotesque or frightful forms as- 
sumed by their art are precisely indicative of 
their distorted moral nature. 

But the truly great nations nearly always 
begin from a race possessing this imaginative 
power ; and for some time their progress is very 
slow, and their state not one of innocence, but 
of feverish and faultful animal energy. This is 
gradually subdued and exalted into bright 
human life ; the art instinct purifying itself with 
the rest of the nature, until social perfectness 
is nearly reached ; and then comes the period 
when conscience and intellect are so highly de- 
veloped, that new forms of error begin in the 
inability to fulfil the demands of the one, or to 
answer the doubts of the other. Then the 
wholeness of the people is lost ; all kinds of 
hypocrisies and oppositions of science develope 
themselves; their faith is questioned on one 
side, and compromised with on the other; 
wealth commonly increases at the same period 
to a destructive extent; luxury follows; and 
the ruin of the nation is then certain : while 
the arts, all this time, are simply, as I said at 
first, the exponents of each phase of its moral 
state, and no more control it in its political 
career than the gleam of the firefly guides its 
oscillation. It is true that their most splendid 
results are usually obtained in the swiftness of 
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John Ruskin 

the power which is hurrying to the precipice ; 
but to lay the charge of the catastrophe to the 
art by which it is illumined, is to find a cause 
for the cataract in the hues of its iris. It is true 
that the colossal vices belonging to periods of 
great national wealth (for wealth, you will find, 
is the real root of all evil) can turn every good 
gift and skill of nature or of man to evil pur- 
pose. If, in such times, fair pictures have been 
misused, how much more fair realities? And 
if Miranda is immoral to Caliban, is that Mi- 
randa's fault ? 

And I could easily go on to trace for you 
what, at the moment I speak, is signified, in 
our own national character, by the forms of art, 
and unhappily also by the forms of what is not 
art, but axe^vta, that exist among us. But the 
more important question is, What will be sig- 
nified by them ; what is there in us now of 
worth and strength which, under our new and 
partly accidental impulse towards formative 
labour, may be by that expressed, and by that 
fortified ? 

Would it not be well to know this? Nay, 
irrespective of all future work, is it not the first 
thing we should want to know, what stuff we 
are made of — how far we are iyaOol or xaxol — 
good, or good for nothing? We may all know 
that, each of ourselves, easily enough, if we like 
to put one grave question well home. 
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Art and Morals 

Supposing it were told any of you by a phy- 
sician whose word you could not but trust, that 
you had not more than seven days to live. And 
suppose also that, by the manner of your edu- 
cation it had happened to you, as it has hap- 
pened to many, never to have heard of any 
future state, or not to have credited what you 
heard ; and therefore that you had to face this 
fact of the approach of death in its simplicity : 
fearing no punishment for any sin that you 
might have before committed, or in the coming 
days might determine to commit ; and having 
similarly no hope of reward for past, or yet 
possible, virtue ; nor even of any consciousness 
whatever to be left to you, after the seventh day 
had ended, either of the results of your acts to 
those whom you loved, or of the feelings of any 
survivors towards you. Then the manner in 
which you would spend the seven days is an 
exact measure of the morality of your nature. 

I know that some of you, and I believe the 
greater number of you, would, in such a case, 
spend the granted days entirely as you ought. 
Neither in numbering the errors, or deploring 
the pleasures of the past ; nor in grasping at 
vile good in the present, nor vainly lamenting 
the darkness of the future ; but in instant and 
earnest execution of whatever it might be pos- 
sible for you to accomplish in the time, in set- 
ting your affairs in order, and in providing for 

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John Ruskin 

the future comfort, and — so far as you might 
by any message or record of yourself — for the 
consolation of those whom you loved, and by 
whom you desired to be remembered, not for 
your good, but for theirs. How far you might 
fail through human weakness, in shame for the 
past, despair at the little that could in the rem- 
nant of life be accomplished, or the intolerable 
pain of broken affection, would depend wholly 
on the degree in which your nature had been 
depressed or fortified by the manner of your 
past life. But I think there are few of you who 
would not spend those last days better than all 
that had preceded them. 

If you look accurately through the records of 
the lives that have been most useful to human- 
ity, you will find that all that has been done 
best, has been done so ; — that to the clearest 
intellects and highest souls, — to the true chil- 
dren of the Father, with whom a thousand 
years are as one day, their poor seventy years 
are but as seven days. The removal of the 
shadow of death from them to an uncertain, but 
always narrow, distance, never takes away from 
them their intuition of its approach ; the ex- 
tending to them of a few hours more or less of 
light abates not their acknowledgment of the 
infinitude that must remain to be known beyond 
their knowledge, — done beyond their deeds: 
the unprofitableness of their momentary service 

I 22 



Art and Morals 

is wrought in a magnificent despair, and their 
very honour is bequeathed by them for the joy 
of others, as they lie down to their rest, regard- 
ing for themselves the voice of men no more. 

The best things, I repeat to you, have been done 
thus, and therefore, sorrowfully. But the great- 
est part of the good work of the world is done 
either in pure and unvexed instinct in duty, "I 
have stubbed Thornaby waste," or else, and 
better, it is cheerful and helpful doing of what 
the hand finds to do, in surety that at evening 
time, whatsoever is right, the Master will give. 
And that it be worthily done, depends wholly 
on that ultimate quantity of worth which you 
can measure, each in himself, by the test I 
have just given you. For that test, observe, 
will mark to you the precise force, first of your 
absolute courage, and then of the energy in you 
for the right ordering of things, and the kindly 
dealing with persons. You have cut away from 
these two instincts every selfish or common 
motive, and left nothing but the energies of 
Order and of Love. 

Now, where those two roots are set, all the 
other powers and desires find right nourish- 
ment, and become to their own utmost, helpful 
to others and pleasurable to ourselves. And 
so far as those two springs of action are not in 
us, all other powers become corrupt or dead ; 
even the love of truth, apart from these, hardens 
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John Ruskin 

into an insolent and cold avarice of knowledge, 
which unused, is more vain than unused gold. 

These, then, are the two essential instincts 
of humanity : the love of Order and the love 
of Kindness. By the love of order the moral 
energy is to deal with the earth, and to dress 
it, and keep it ; and with all rebellious and dis- 
solute forces in lower creatures, or in ourselves. 
By the love of doing kindness it is to deal rightly 
with all surrounding life. And then, grafted 
on these, we are to make every other passion 
perfect ; so that they may every one have full 
strength and yet be absolutely under control. 

Every one must be strong, every one perfect, 
every one obedient as a war horse. And it is 
among the most beautiful pieces of mysticism 
to which eternal truth is attached, that the 
chariot race, which Plato uses as an image of 
moral government, and which is indeed the 
most perfect type of it in any visible skill of 
men, should have been made by the Greeks 
the continual subject of their best poetry and 
best art. Nevertheless, Plato's use of it is not 
altogether true. There is no black horse in 
the chariot of the soul. One of the driver's 
worst faults is in starving his horses; another, 
in not breaking them early enough ; but they 
are all good. Take, for example, one usually 
thought of as wholly evil — that of Anger, lead- 
ing to vengeance. I believe it to be quite one 
124 



Art and Morals 

of the crowning wickednesses of this age that 
we have starved and chilled our faculty of in- 
dignation, and neither desire nor dare to punish 
crime justly. We have taken up the benevolent 
idea, forsooth, that justice is to be preventive 
instead of vindictive ; and we imagine that we 
are to punish, not in anger, but in expediency; 
not that we may give deserved pain to the per- 
son in fault, but that we may frighten other 
people from committing the same fault. The 
beautiful theory of this non-vindictive justice is, 
that having convicted a man of a crime worthy 
of death, we entirely pardon the criminal, re- 
store him to his place in our affection and 
esteem, and then hang him, not as a malefac- 
tor, but as a scarecrow. That is the theory. 
And the practice is, that we send a child to 
prison for a month for stealing a handful of 
walnuts, for fear that other children should 
come to steal more of our walnuts. And we do 
not punish a swindler" for ruining a thousand 
families, because we think swindling is a whole- 
some excitement to trade. 

But all true justice is vindictive to vice as 
it is rewarding to virtue. Only — and herein 
it is distinguished from personal revenge — it 
is vindictive of the wrong done, not of the 
wrong done to us. It is the national expression 
of deliberate anger, as of deliberate gratitude; 
it is not exemplary, or even corrective, but 

125 



John Ruskin 

essentially retributive ; it is the absolute art of 
measured recompense, giving honour where 
honour is due, and shame where shame is due, 
and joy where joy is due, and pain where pain 
is due. It is neither educational, for men are 
to be educated by wholesome habit, not by re- 
wards and punishments; nor is it preventive, 
for it is to be executed without regard to any 
consequences; but only for righteousness' sake, 
a righteous nation does judgment and justice. 
But in this, as in all other instances, the Tight- 
ness of the secondary passion depends on its 
being grafted on those two primary instincts, 
the love of order and of kindness, so that indig- 
nation itself is against the wounding of love. 
Do you think the jxtjvis 'AyiX-r^ came of a hard 
heart in Achilles, or the " Pallas te hoc vulnere, 
Pallas," of a hard heart in Anchises' son ? 

And now, if with this clue through the laby- 
rinth of them, you remember the course of the 
arts of great nations, you will perceive that 
whatever has prospered, and become lovely, 
had its beginning — for no other was possible — 
in the love of order in material things associated 
with true Sixguogovy), and the desire of beauty in 
material things, which is associated with true 
affection, charitas ; and with the innumerable 
conditions of true gentleness expressed by the 
different uses of the words y^oir, and gratia. 
You will find that this love of beauty is an es- 
i 26 



Art and Morals 

sential part of all healthy human nature, and 
though it can long co-exist with states of life in 
many other respects unvirtuous, it is itself 
wholly good ; — the direct adversary of envy, 
avarice, mean worldly care, and especially of 
cruelty. It entirely perishes when these are 
wilfully indulged; and the men in whom it has 
been most strong have always been compassion- 
ate, and lovers of justice, and the earliest dis- 
cerners and declarers of things conducive to 
the happiness of mankind. 

Nearly every important truth respecting the 
love of beauty in its familiar relations to human 
life was mythically expressed by the Greeks in 
their various accounts of the parentage and 
offices of the Graces. But one fact, the most 
vital of all, they could not in its fulness per- 
ceive, namely, that the intensity of other per- 
ceptions of beauty is exactly commensurate 
with the imaginative purity of the passion of 
love, and with the singleness of its devotion. 
They were not fully conscious of, and could not 
therefore either mythically or philosophically 
express, the deep relation within themselves 
between their power of perceiving beauty, and 
the honour of domestic affection which found 
their sternest themes of tragedy in the infringe- 
ment of its laws ; — which made the rape of 
Helen the chief subject of their epic poetry, and 
which fastened their clearest symbolism of 
127 



John Ruskin 

resurrection on the story of Alcestis. Unhap- 
pily, the subordinate position of their most 
revered women, and the partial corruption of 
feeling towards them by the presence of certain 
other singular states of inferior passion which it 
is as difficult as grievous to analyse, arrested 
the ethical as well as the formative progress of 
the Greek mind ; and it was not until after an 
interval of nearly two thousand years of various 
error and pain, that, partly as the true reward 
of Christian warfare nobly sustained through 
centuries of trial, and partly as the visionary 
culmination of the faith which saw in a maiden's 
purity the link between God and her race, the 
highest and holiest strength of mortal love was 
reached; and, together with it, in the song of 
Dante, and the painting of Bernard of Luino 
and his fellows, the perception, and embodi- 
ment for ever of " whatsoever things are pure, 
whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things 
are of good report"; — that, if there be any vir- 
tue, and if there be any praise, men might think 
on those things. 

You probably observed the expression I used 
a moment ago, the imaginative purity of the 
passion of love. I have not yet spoken, nor is 
it possible for me to-day to speak adequately, 
of the moral power of the imagination : but you 
may for yourselves enough discern its nature 
merely by comparing the dignity of the relations 
128 



Art and Morals 

between the sexes, from their lowest level in 
moths or mollusca, through the higher creatures 
in whom they become a domestic influence and 
law, up to the love of pure men and women ; 
and, finally, to the ideal love which animated 
chivalry. Throughout this vast ascent it is the 
gradual increase of the imaginative faculty 
which exalts and enlarges the authority of the 
passion until, at its height, it is the bulwark of 
patience, the tutor of honour, and the perfect- 
ness of praise. 

You will find farther, that as of love, so of all 
the other passions, the right government and 
exaltation begins in that of the Imagination, 
which is lord over them. For to subdue the pas- 
sions, which is thought so often to be the sum 
of duty respecting them, is possible enough to 
a proud dulness ; but to excite them rightly, 
and make them strong for good, is the work 
of the unselfish imagination. It is constantly 
said that human nature is heartless. Do not 
believe it. Human nature is kind and gener- 
ous ; but it is narrow and blind ; and can only 
with difficulty conceive anything but what it 
immediately sees and feels. People would in- 
stantly care for others as well as themselves if 
only they could imagine others as well as them- 
selves. Let a child fall into the river before 
the roughest man's eyes; — he will usually do 
what he can to get it out, even at some risk to 
129 



John Ruskin 

himself; and all the town will triumph in the 
saving of one little life. Let the same man be 
shown that hundreds of children are dying of 
fever for want of some sanitary measure which 
it will cost him trouble to urge, and he will 
make no effort; and probably all the town 
would resist him if he did. So, also, the lives 
of many deserving women are passed in a suc- 
cession of petty anxieties about themselves, and 
gleaming of minute interests and mean pleasures 
in their immediate circle, because they are 
never taught to make any effort to look beyond 
it ; or to know anything about the mighty world 
in which their lives are fading, like blades of 
bitter grass in fruitless fields. 

I had intended to enlarge on this — and yet 
more on the kingdom which every man holds 
in his conceptive faculty, to be peopled with 
active thoughts and lovely presences, or left 
waste for the springing up of those dark desires 
and dreams of which it is written that " every 
imagination of the thoughts of man's heart is 
evil continually." True, and a thousand times 
true it is, that, here at least, " greater is he that 
ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh a city." 
But this you can partly follow out for yourselves 
without help, partly we must leave it for future 
enquiry. I press to the conclusion which I 
wish to leave with you, that all you can rightly 
do, or honourably become, depends on the 



Art and Morals 

government of these two instincts of order and 
kindness, by this great Imaginative faculty, 
which gives you inheritance of the past, grasp 
of the present, authority over the future. Map 
out the spaces of your possible lives by its help ; 
measure the range of their possible agency ! 
On the walls and towers of this your fair city, 
there is not an ornament of which the first 
origin may not be traced back to the thoughts 
of men who died two thousand years ago. 
Whom w\\\you be governing by your thoughts, 
two thousand years hence ? Think of it, and 
you will find that so far from art being im- 
moral, little else except art is moral ; that life 
without industry is guilt, and industry without 
art is brutality; and for the words "good" and 
" wicked," used of men, you may almost substi- 
tute the words "Makers" or "Destroyers." 
Far the greater part of the seeming prosperity 
of the world is, so far as our present knowledge 
extends, vain: wholly useless for any kind of 
good, but having assigned to it a certain inevi- 
table sequence of destruction and of sorrow. 
Its stress is only the stress of wandering storm ; 
its beauty the hectic of plague: and what is 
called the history of mankind is too often the 
record of the whirlwind, and the map of the 
spreading of the leprosy. But underneath all 
that, or in narrow spaces of dominion in the 
midst of it, the work of every man, "qui non 

13* 



John Ruskin 

accepit in vanitatem animam suam," endures 
and prospers ; a small remnant or green bud 
of it prevailing at last over evil. And though 
faint with sickness, and encumbered in ruin, 
the true workers redeem inch by inch the wil- 
derness into garden ground ; by the help of 
their joined hands the order of all things is 
surely sustained and vitally expanded, and 
although with strange vacillation, in the eyes 
of the watcher, the morning cometh, and also 
the night, there is no hour of human existence 
that does not draw on towards the perfect day. 
And perfect the day shall be, when it is of all 
men understood that the beauty of Holiness 
must be in labour as well as in rest. Nay ! 
more, if it may be, in labour; in our strength, 
rather than in our weakness ; and in the choice 
of what we shall work for through the six days, 
and may know to be good at their evening 
time, than in the choice of what we pray for on 
the seventh, of reward or repose. With the 
multitude that keep holiday, we may perhaps 
sometimes vainly have gone up to the house 
of the Lord, and vainly there asked for what 
we fancied would be mercy ; but for the few who 
labour as their Lord would have them the mercy 
needs no seeking, and their wide home no hallow- 
ing. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow 
them all the days of their life ; and they shall 
dwell in the house of the Lord— FOR ever. 
132 



The Mystery of Life 



The Mystery of Life 

Lecture Delivered in the Theatre of the 
Royal College of Science, Dublin, 1868 

When I accepted the privilege of addressing 
you to-day, I was not aware of a restriction 
with respect to the topics of discussion which 
may be brought before this Society* — a restrict 
tion which, though entirely wise and right 
under the circumstances contemplated in its in- 
troduction, would necessarily have disabled me, 
thinking as I think, from preparing any lecture 
for you on the subject of art in a form which 
might be permanently useful. Pardon me, 
therefore, in so far as I must transgress such 
limitation ; for indeed my infringement will be 
of the letter — not of the spirit — of your com- 
mands. In whatever I may say touching the 
religion which has been the foundation of art, 
or the policy which has contributed to its power, 

* That no reference should be made to religious questions. 

J 35 



John Ruskin 

if I offend one, I shall offend all ; for I shall 
take no note of any separations in creeds, or 
antagonisms in parties : neither do I fear that 
ultimately I shall offend any, by proving — or 
at least stating as capable of positive proof — ■ 
the connection of all that is best in the crafts 
and arts of man, with the simplicity of his faith, 
and the sincerity of his patriotism. 

But I speak to you under another disadvan- 
tage, by which I am checked in frankness of ut- 
terance, not here only, but everywhere; namely, 
that I am never fully aware how far my audi- 
ences are disposed to give me credit for real know- 
ledge of my subject, or how far they grant me 
attention only because I have been sometimes 
thought an ingenious or pleasant essayist upon 
it. For I have had what, in many respects, I 
boldly call the misfortune, to set my words 
sometimes prettily together; not without a fool- 
ish vanity in the poor knack that I had of 
doing so ; until I was heavily punished for this 
pride, by finding that many people thought of 
the words only, and cared nothing for their 
meaning. Happily, therefore, the power of 
using such pleasant language — if indeed it 
ever were mine — is passing away from me; 
and whatever I am now able to say at all, I find 
myself forced to say with great plainness. For 
my thoughts have changed also, as my words 
have; and whereas in earlier life, what little 
136 



The Mystery of Life 

influence I obtained was due perhaps chiefly to 
the enthusiasm with which I was able to dwell 
on the beauty of the physical clouds, and of 
their colours in the sky ; so all the influence I 
now desire to retain must be due to the ear- 
nestness with which I am endeavouring to trace 
the form and beauty of another kind of cloud 
than those; the bright cloud, of which it is 
written — 

"What is your life? It is even as a vapour 
that appeareth for a little time, and then 
vanisheth away." 

I suppose few people reach the middle or lat- 
ter period of their age, without having, at some 
moment of change or disappointment, felt the 
truth of those bitter words ; and been startled 
by the fading of the sunshine from the cloud of 
their life, into the sudden agony of the know- 
ledge that the fabric of it was as fragile as a 
dream, and the endurance of it as transient as 
the dew. But it is not always that, even at 
such times as melancholy surprise, we can enter 
into any true perception that this human life 
shares, in the nature of it, not only the evan- 
escence, but the mystery of the cloud ; that its 
avenues are wreathed in darkness, and its 
forms and courses no less fantastic, than spec- 
tral and obscure ; so that not only in the vanity 
which we cannot grasp, but in the shadow 
which we cannot pierce, it is true of this cloudy 
l 37 



John Ruskin 

life of ours, that " man walketh in a vain shadow, 
and disquieteth himself in vain." 

And least of all, whatever may have been the 
eagerness of our passions, or the height of our 
pride, are we able to understand in its depth 
the third and most solemn character in which 
our life is like those clouds of heaven ; that to 
it belongs not only their transience, not only 
their mystery, but also their power ; that in the 
cloud of the human soul there is a fire stronger 
than the lightning, and a grace more precious 
than the rain ; and that though of the good and 
evil it shall one day be said alike, that the place 
that knew them knows them no more, there is 
an infinite separation between those whose 
brief presence had there been a blessing, like 
the mist of Eden that went up from the earth to 
water the garden, and those whose place knew 
them only as a drifting and changeful shade, 
of whom the heavenly sentence is, that they are 
"wells without water; clouds that are carried 
with a tempest, to whom the mist of darkness 
is reserved for ever ? " 

To those among us, however, who have lived 
long enough to form some just estimate of the 
rate of the changes which are, hour by hour 
in accelerating catastrophe, manifesting them- 
selves in the laws, the arts, and the creeds of 
men, it seems to me, that now at least, if never 
at any former time, the thoughts of the true 

138 



The Mystery of Life 

nature of our life, and of its powers and re- 
sponsibilities, should present themselves with 
absolute sadness and sternness. 

And although I know that this feeling is 
much deepened in my own mind by disappoint- 
ment, which, by chance, has attended the 
greater number of my cherished purposes, I do 
not for that reason distrust the feeling itself, 
though I am on my guard against an exagger- 
ated degree of it : nay, I rather believe that in 
periods of new effort and violent change, disap- 
pointment is a wholesome medicine ; and that 
in the secret of it, as in the twilight so beloved 
by Titian, we may see the colours of things 
with deeper truth than in the most dazzling sun- 
shine. And because these truths about the 
works of men, which I want to bring to-day 
before you, are most of them sad ones, though 
at the same time helpful ; and because also I 
believe that your kind Irish hearts will answer 
more gladly to the truthful expression of a 
personal feeling, than to the exposition of an 
abstract principle, I will permit myself so much 
unreserved speaking of my own causes of re- 
gret, as may enable you to make just allowance 
for what, according to your sympathies, you 
will call either the bitterness, or the insight, of 
a mind which has surrendered its best hopes, 
and been foiled in its favourite aims. 

I spent the ten strongest years of my life, 

139 



John Ruskin 

(from twenty to thirty,) in endeavouring to 
show the excellence of the work of the man 
whom I believed, and rightly believed, to be 
the greatest painter of the schools of England 
since Reynolds. I had then perfect faith in 
the power of every great truth or beauty to pre- 
vail ultimately, and take its right place in use- 
fulness and honour ; and I strove to bring the 
painter's work into this due place, while the 
painter was yet alive. But he knew, better 
than I, the uselessness of talking about what 
people could not see for themselves. He always 
discouraged me scornfully, even when he 
thanked me — and he died before even the su- 
perficial effect of my work was visible. I went 
on, however, thinking I could at least be of use 
to the public, if not to him, in proving his 
power. My books got talked about a little. 
The prices of modern pictures, generally, rose, 
and I was beginning to take some pleasure in a 
sense of gradual victory, when, fortunately or 
unfortunately, an opportunity of perfect trial 
undeceived me at once, and for ever. The 
Trustees of the National Gallery commissioned 
me to arrange the Turner drawings there, and 
permitted me to prepare three hundred exam- 
ples of his studies from nature, for exhibition 
at Kensington. At Kensington they were and 
are placed for exhibition; but they are not ex- 
140 



The Mystery of Life 

hibited, for the room in which they hang is 
always empty. 

Well — this showed me at once, that those 
ten years of my life had been, in their chief 
purpose, lost. For that, I did not so much care; 
I had, at least, learned my own business thor- 
oughly, and should be able, as I fondly sup- 
posed, after such a lesson, now to use my 
knowledge with better effect. But what I did 
care for, was the — to me frightful — discovery, 
that the most splendid genius in the arts might 
be permitted by Providence to labour and perish 
uselessly ; that in the very fineness of it there 
might be something rendering it invisible to 
ordinary eyes; but, that with this strange ex- 
cellence, faults might be mingled which would 
be as deadly as its virtues were vain ; that the 
glory of it was perishable, as well as invisible, 
and the gift and grace of it might be to us, as 
snow in summer, and as rain in harvest. 

That was the first mystery of life to me. 
But, while my best energy was given to the 
study of painting, I had put collateral effort, 
more prudent, if less enthusiastic, into that of 
architecture ; and in this I could not complain 
of meeting with no sympathy. Among several 
personal reasons which caused me to desire that 
I might give this, my closing lecture on the 
subject of art here, in Ireland, one of the chief 
141 



John Ruskin 

was, that in reading it, I should stand near the 
beautiful building, — the engineers' school of 
your college, — which was the first realisation I 
had the joy to see, of the principles I had, until 
then, been endeavouring to teach ; but which 
alas, is now, to me, no more than the richly 
canopied monument of one of the most earnest 
souls that ever gave itself to the arts, and one 
of my truest and most loving friends, Benjamin 
Woodward. Nor was it here in Ireland only 
that I received the help of Irish sympathy and 
genius. When, to another friend, Sir Thomas 
Deane, with Mr. Woodward, was entrusted the 
building of the museum at Oxford, the best de- 
tails of the work were executed by sculptors 
who had been born and trained here; and the 
first window of the facade of the building, in 
which was inaugurated the study of natural sci- 
ence in England, in true fellowship with litera- 
ture, was carved from my design by an Irish 
sculptor. 

You may perhaps think that no man ought 
to speak of disappointment, to whom, even in 
one branch of labour, so much success was 
granted. Had Mr. Woodward now been beside 
me, I had not so spoken ; but his gentle and 
passionate spirit was cut off from the fulfilment 
of its purposes, and the work we did together is 
now become vain. It may not be so in future; 
but the architecture we endeavoured to intro- 
142 



The Mystery of Life 

duce is inconsistent alike with the reckless 
luxury, the deforming mechanism, and the 
squalid misery of modern cities; among the 
formative fashions of the day, aided, especially 
in England, by ecclesiastical sentiment, it in- 
deed obtained notoriety ; and sometimes behind 
an engine furnace, or a railroad bank, you may 
detect the pathetic discord of its momentary 
grace, and, with toil, decipher its floral carv- 
ings choked with soot. I felt answerable to the 
schools I loved, only for their injury. I per- 
ceived that this new portion of my strength had 
also been spent in vain ; and from amidst 
streets of iron, and palaces of crystal, shrank 
back at last to the carving of the mountain and 
colour of the flower. 

And still I could tell of failure, and failure 
repeated as years went on ; but I have tres- 
passed enough on your patience to show you, 
in part, the causes of my discouragement. 
Now let me more deliberately tell you its re- 
sults. You know there is a tendency in the 
minds of many men, when they are heavily dis- 
appointed in the main purposes of their life, 
to feel, and perhaps in warning, perhaps in 
mockery, to declare, that life itself is a vanity. 
Because it has disappointed them, they think 
its nature is of disappointment always, or at 
best, of pleasure that can be grasped by imagi- 
nation only; that the cloud of it has no strength 

143 



John Ruskin 

nor fire within ; but is a painted cloud only, to 
be delighted in, yet despised. You know how 
beautifully Pope has expressed this particular 
phase of thought : — 

" Meanwhile opinion gilds, with varying rays, 
These painted clouds that beautify our days ; 
Each want of happiness by hope supplied, 
And each vacuity of sense, by pride. 

" Hope builds as fast as Knowledge can destroy; 
In Folly's cup, still laughs the bubble joy. 
One pleasure past, another still we gain, 
And not a vanity is given in vain." 

But the effect of failure upon my own mind has 
been just the reverse of this. The more that 
my life disappointed me, the more solemn and 
wonderful it became to me. It seemed, con- 
trarily to Pope's saying, that the vanity of it 
was indeed given in vain ; but that there was 
something behind the veil of it, which was not 
vanity. It became to me not a painted cloud, 
but a terrible and impenetrable one : not a 
mirage, which vanished as I drew near, but a 
pillar of darkness, to which I was forbidden to 
draw near. For I saw that both my own fail- 
ure, and such success in petty things as in its 
poor triumph seemed to me worse than failure, 
came from the want of sufficiently earnest effort 
144 



The Mystery of Life 

to understand the whole law and meaning of 
existence, and to bring it to noble and due end; 
as, on the other hand, I saw more and more 
clearly that all enduring success in the arts, or 
in any other occupation, had come from the 
ruling of lower purposes, not by a conviction of 
their nothingness, but by a solemn faith in the 
advancing power of human nature, or in the 
promise, however dimly apprehended, that the 
mortal part of it would one day be swallowed up 
in immortality ; and that, indeed, the arts them- 
selves never had reached any vital strength or 
honour but in the effort to proclaim this immor- 
tality, and in the service either of great and 
just religion, or of some unselfish patriotism, 
and law of such national life as must be the 
foundation of religion. 

Nothing that I have ever said is more true or 
necessary — nothing has been more misunder- 
stood or misapplied — than my strong assertion, 
that the arts can never be right themselves, un- 
less their motive is right. It is misunderstood 
this way: weak painters, who have never learned 
their business, and cannot lay a true line, con- 
tinually come to me, crying out — "Look at 
this picture of mine ; it must be good, I had 
such a lovely motive. I have put my whole 
heart into it, and taken years to think over its 
treatment." Well, the only answer for these 
people is — if one had the cruelty to make it — 

145 



John Ruskin 

61 Sir, you cannot think over anything in any 
number of years, — you haven't the head to do 
it; and though you had fine motives, strong 
enough to make you burn yourself in a slow- 
fire, if only first you could paint a picture, you 
can't paint one, nor half an inch of you ; you 
haven't the hand to do it." 

But, far more decisively we have to say to the 
men who do know their business, or may know 
it if they choose — " Sir, you have this gift and 
a mighty one ; see that you serve your nation 
faithfully with it. It is a greater trust than 
ships and armies : you might cast them away, 
if you were their captain, with less treason to 
your people than in casting your own glorious 
power away, and serving the devil with it in- 
stead of men. Ships and armies you may re- 
place if they are lost, but a great intellect, once 
abused, is a curse to the earth for ever." 

This, then, L meant by saying that the arts 
must have noble motive. This also I said re- 
specting them, that they never had prospered, 
nor could prosper, but when they had such true 
purpose, and were devoted to the proclamation 
of divine truth or law. And yet I saw also that 
they had always failed in this proclamation — 
that poetry, and sculpture, and painting, though 
only great when they strove to teach us some- 
thing about the gods, never had taught us any- 
thing trustworthy about the gods, but had always 
146 



The Mystery of Life 

betrayed their trust in the crisis of it, and, with 
their powers at the full reach, became ministers 
to pride and to lust. And I felt also, with increas- 
ing amazement, the unconquerable apathy in 
ourselves the hearers, no less than in these the 
teachers ; and that, while the wisdom and Tight- 
ness of every act and art of life could only be 
consistent with a right understanding of the 
ends of life, we were all plunged as in a languid 
dream — our heart fat, and our eyes heavy, 
and our ears closed, lest the inspiration of hand 
or voice should reach us — lest we should see 
with our eyes, and understand with our hearts, 
and be healed. 

This intense apathy in all of us is the first 
great mystery of life; it stands in the way of 
every perception, every virtue. There is no 
making ourselves feel enough astonishment at 
it. That the occupations or pastimes of life 
should have no motive, is understandable ; but 
— That life itself should have no motive — that 
we neither care to find out what it may lead to, 
nor to guard against its being for ever taken 
away from us — here is a mystery indeed. For, 
just suppose I were able to call at this moment 
to any one in this audience by name, and to tell 
him positively that I knew a large estate had 
been lately left to him on some curious condi- 
tions; but that, though I knew it was large, I did 
riot know how large, nor even where it was — 
H7 



John Ruskin 

whether in the East Indies or the West, or in 
England, or at the Antipodes. I only knew it 
was a vast estate, and that there was a chance 
of his losing it altogether if he did not soon 
find out on what terms it had been left to him. 
Suppose 1 were able to say this positively to 
any single man in this audience, and he knew 
that I did not speak without warrant, do you 
think that he would rest content with that 
vague knowledge, if it were anywise possible to 
obtain more ? Would he not give every energy 
to find some trace of the facts, and never rest 
till he had ascertained where this place was, 
and what it was like ? And suppose he were a 
young man, and all he could discover by his 
best endeavour was, that the estate was never 
to be his at all, unless he persevered, during 
certain years of probation, in an orderly and in- 
dustrious life; but that, according to the Tight- 
ness of his conduct, the portion of the estate 
assigned to him would be greater or less, so 
that it literally depended on his behaviour from 
day to day whether he got ten thousand a year, 
or thirty thousand a year, or nothing whatever 
— would you not think it strange if the youth 
never troubled himself to satisfy the conditions 
in any way, nor even to know what was re- 
quired of him, but lived exactly as he chose, 
and never inquired whether his chances of the 
estate were increasing or passing away ? Well, 
148 



The Mystery of Life 

you know that this is actually and literally so 
with the greater number of the educated per- 
sons now living in Christian countries. Nearly 
every man and woman, in any company such 
as this, outwardly professes to believe — and a 
large number unquestionably think they believe 
— much more than this; not only that a quite 
unlimited estate is in prospect for them if they 
please the Holder of it, but that the infinite 
contrary of such a possession — an estate of 
perpetual misery, is in store for them if they 
displease this great Land-Holder, this great 
Heaven-Holder. And yet there is not one in a 
thousand of these human souls that cares to 
think, for ten minutes of the day, where this 
estate is, or how beautiful it is, or what kind of 
life they are to lead in it, or what kind of life 
they must lead to obtain it. 

You fancy that you care to know this : so 
little do you care that, probably, at this mo- 
ment many of you are displeased with me for 
talking of the matter ! You came to hear 
about the Art of this world, not about the Life 
of the next, and you are provoked with me for 
talking of what you can hear any Sunday in 
church. But do not be afraid. I will tell you 
something before you go about pictures, and 
carvings, and pottery, and what else you would 
like better to hear of than the other world. 
Nay, perhaps you say, "We want you to talk 
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John Ruskin 

of pictures and pottery, because we are sure 
that you know something of them, and you 
know nothing of the other world." Well — I 
don't. That is quite true. But the very strange « 
ness and mystery of which I urge you to take 
notice is in this — that I do not; — nor you 
either. Can you answer a single bold question 
unflinchingly about that other world — Are you 
sure there is a heaven ? Sure there is a hell ? 
Sure that men are dropping before your faces 
through the pavements of these streets into 
eternal fire, or sure that they are not? Sure 
that at your own death you are going to be de- 
livered from all sorrow, to be endowed with all 
virtue, to be gifted with all felicity, and raised 
into perpetual companionship with a King, com- 
pared to whom the kings of the earth are as 
grasshoppers, and the nations as the dust of 
His feet ? Are you sure of this ? or, if not sure, 
do any of us so much as care to make it sure ? 
and, if not, how can anything that we do be 
right — how can anything we think be wise; 
what honour can there be in the arts that amuse 
us, or what profit in the possessions that please ? 

Is not this a mystery of life? 

But farther, you may, perhaps, think it a 
beneficent ordinance for the generality of men 
that they do not, with earnestness or anxiety, 
dwell on such questions of the future ; because 
the business of the day could not be done if this 

150 



The Mystery of Life 

kind of thought were taken by all of us for the 
morrow. Be it so: but at least we might an- 
ticipate that the greatest and wisest of us, who 
were evidently the appointed teachers of the 
rest, would set themselves apart to seek out 
whatever could be surely known of the future 
destinies of their race; and to teach this in no 
rhetorical or ambiguous manner, but in the 
plainest and most severely earnest words. 

Now, the highest representatives of men who 
have thus endeavoured, during the Christian 
era, to search out these deep things, and relate 
them, are Dante and Milton. There are none 
who for earnestness of thought, for mastery of 
word, can be classed with these. I am not at 
present, mind you, speaking of persons set apart 
in any priestly or pastoral office, to deliver 
creeds to us, or doctrines ; but of men who try 
to discover and set forth, as far as by human 
intellect is possible, the facts of the other world. 
Divines may perhaps teach us how to arrive 
there, but only these two poets have in any 
powerful manner striven to discover, or in any 
definite words professed to tell, what we shall 
see and become there : or how those upper and 
nether worlds are, and have been, inhabited. 

And what have they told us ? Milton's ac- 
count of the most important event in his whole 
system of the universe, the fall of the angels, is 
evidently unbelievable to himself; and the more 

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John Ruskin 

so, that it is wholly founded on, and in a great 
part spoiled and degraded from, Hesiod's ac- 
count of the decisive war of the younger gods 
with the Titans. The rest of his poem is a pic- 
turesque drama, in which every artifice of in- 
vention is visibly and consciously employed, not 
a single fact being, for an instant, conceived as 
tenable by any living faith. Dante's conception 
is far more intense, and, by himself, for the 
time, not to be escaped from ; it is indeed a 
vision, but a vision only, and that one of the 
wildest that ever entranced a soul — a dream in 
which every grotesque type or phantasy of 
heathen tradition is renewed, and adorned ; 
and the destinies of the Christian Church, un- 
der their most sacred symbols, become literally 
subordinate to the praise, and are only to be 
understood by the aid, of one dear Florentine 
maiden. 

I tell you truly that, as I strive more with 
this strange lethargy and trance in myself, and 
awake to the meaning and power of life, it 
seems daily more amazing to me that men such 
as these should dare to play with the most 
precious truths (or the most deadly untruths), 
by which the whole human race listening to 
them could be informed, or deceived ; — all the 
world their audiences for ever, with pleased ear, 
and passionate heart ; — and yet, to this sub- 
missive infinitude of souls, and evermore suc- 

*S 2 



The Mystery of Life 

ceeding and succeeding multitude, hungry for 
bread of life, they do but play upon sweetly 
modulated pipes ; with pompous nomenclature 
adorn the councils of hell ; touch a troubadour's 
guitar to the courses of the suns ; and fill the 
openings of eternity, before which prophets have 
veiled their faces, and which angels desire to 
look into, with idle puppets of their scholastic 
imagination, and melancholy lights of frantic 
faith in their lost mortal love. 

Is not this a mystery of life ? 

But more. We have to remember that these 
two great teachers were both of them warped in 
their temper, and thwarted in their search for 
truth. They were men of intellectual war, un- 
able, through darkness of controversy, or stress 
of personal grief, to discern where their own 
ambition modified their utterances of the moral 
law; or their own agony mingled with their 
anger at its violation. But greater men than 
these have been — innocent-hearted — too great 
for contest. Men, like Homer and Shakes- 
peare, of so unrecognised personality, that it 
disappears in future ages, and becomes ghostly, 
like the tradition of a lost he then god. Men, 
therefore, to whose unoffended, uncondemning 
sight, the whole of human nature reveals itself 
in a pathetic weakness, with which they will 
not strive; or in mournful and transitory 
strength, which they dare not praise. And all 

*53 



John Ruskin 

Pagan and Christian civilisation thus becomes 
subject to them. It does not matter how little, 
or how much, any of us have read, either of 
Homer or Shakespeare : everything round us, 
in substance, or in thought, has been moulded 
by them. All Greek gentlemen were educated 
under Homer. All Roman gentlemen, by 
Greek literature. All Italian, and French, and 
English gentlemen, by Roman literature, and 
by its principles. Of the scope of Shakespeare, 
I will say only, that the intellectual measure of 
every man since born, in the domains of cre- 
ative thought, may be assigned to him, accord- 
ing to the degree in which he has been taught 
by Shakespeare. Well, what do these two 
men, centres of moral intelligence, deliver to 
us of conviction respecting what it most behoves 
that intelligence to grasp ? What is their hope ; 
their crown of rejoicing? what manner of ex- 
hortation have they for us, or of rebuke ? what 
lies next their own hearts, and dictates their 
undying words? Have they any peace to 
promise to our unrest — any redemption to our 
misery ? 

Take Homer first, and think if there is any 
sadder image of human fate than the great 
Homeric story. The main features in the char- 
acter of Achilles are its intense desire of justice, 
and its tenderness of affection. And in that 
bitter song of the Iliad, this man, though aided 

*54 



The Mystery of Life 

continually by the wisest of the gods, and 
burning with the desire of justice in his heart, 
becomes yet, through ill-governed passion, the 
most unjust of men : and, full of the deepest 
tenderness in his heart, becomes yet through 
ill-governed passion, the most cruel of men. 
Intense alike in love and in friendship, he 
loses, first his mistress, and then his friend ; 
for the sake of the one, he surrenders to death 
the armies of his own land ; for the sake of the 
other, he surrenders all. Will a man lay down 
his life for his friend ? Yea — even for his dead 
friend, this Achilles, though goddess-oorn, and 
goddess-taught, gives up his kingdom, his 
country, and his life — casts alike the innocent 
and guilty, with himself, into one gulf of 
slaughter, and dies at last by the hand of the 
basest of his adversaries. Is not this a mystery 
of life? 

But what, then, is the message to us of our 
own poet, and searcher of hearts, after fifteen 
hundred years of Christian faith have been num- 
bered over the graves of men ? Are his words 
more cheerful than the heathen's — is his hope 
more near — his trust more sure — his reading 
of fate more happy ? Ah, no ! He differs from 
the heathen poet chiefly in this — that he re- 
cognises, for deliverance, no gods nigh at hand; 
and that, by petty chance — by momentary 
folly — by broken message — by fool's tyranny 

155 



John Ruskin 

— or traitor's snare, the strongest and most 
righteous are brought to their ruin, and perish 
without word of hope. He indeed, as part of 
his rendering of character, ascribes the power 
and modesty of habitual devotion, to the gentle 
and the just. The death-bed of Katharine is 
bright with vision of angels ; and the great 
soldier-king, standing by his few dead, acknow- 
ledges the presence of the hand that can save 
alike by many or by few. But observe that 
from those who with deepest spirit, meditate, 
and with deepest passion, mourn, there are no 
such words as these ; nor in their hearts are any 
such consolations. Instead of the perpetual 
sense of the helpful presence of the Deity, which, 
through all heathen tradition, is the source of 
heroic strength, in battle, in exile, and in the 
valley of the shadow of death, we find only in 
the great Christian poet, the consciousness of a 
moral law, through which "the gods are just, 
and of our pleasant vices make instruments to 
scourge us ; " and of the resolved arbitration of 
the destinies, that conclude into precision of 
doom what we feebly and blindly began; and 
force us, when our indiscretion serves us, and 
our deepest plots do pall, to the confession, that 
"there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough 
hew them how we will." 

Is not this a mystery of life ? 

Be it so then. About this human life that is 

156 



The Mystery of Life 

to be, or that is, the wise religious men tell us 
nothing that we can trust ; and the wise con- 
templative men, nothing that can give us peace. 
But there is yet a third class, to whom we may- 
turn — the wise practical men. We have sat 
at the feet of the poets who sang of heaven, 
and they have told us their dreams. We have 
listened to the poets who sang of earth, and 
they have chanted to us dirges, and words of 
despair. But there is one class of men more : 
■ — men, not capable of vision, nor sensitive to 
sorrow, but firm of purpose — practised in busi- 
ness: learned in all that can be, (by hand- 
ling, — ) known. Men whose hearts and hopes 
are wholly in this present world, from whom, 
therefore, we may surely learn, at least, how 5 
at present, conveniently to live in it. What 
will they say to us, or show us by example ? 
These kings — these councillors — these states- 
men and builders of kingdoms — these capital- 
ists and men of business, who weigh the earth, 
and the dust of it, in a balance. They know 
the world, surely ; and what is the mystery of 
life to us, is none to them. They can surely 
show us how to live, while we live, and to 
gather out of the present world what is best. 
I think I can best tell you their answer, by 
telling you a dream I had once. For though I 
am no poet, I have dreams sometimes: — I 
dreamed I was at a child's May-day party, in 

157 



John Ruskin 

which every means of entertainment had been 
provided for them, by a wise and kind host. It 
was in a stately house, with beautiful gardens 
attached to it; and the children had been set 
free in the rooms and gardens, with no care 
whatever but how to pass their afternoon re- 
joicingly. They did not, indeed, know much 
about what was to happen next day ; and some 
of them, I thought, were a little frightened, be- 
cause there was a chance of their being sent to 
a new school where there were examinations; 
but they kept the thoughts of that out of their 
heads as well as they could, and resolved to 
enjoy themselves. The house, I said, was in a 
beautiful garden, and in the garden were all 
kinds of flowers ; sweet grassy banks for rest ; 
and smooth lawns for play ; and pleasant 
streams and woods ; and rocky places for 
climbing. And the children were happy for a 
little while, but presently they separated them- 
selves into parties ; and then each party de- 
clared, it would have a piece of the garden for 
its own, and that none of the others should have 
anything to do with that piece. Next, they 
quarrelled violently, which pieces they would 
have ; and at last the boys took up the thing, 
as boys should do, " practically," and fought in 
the flower-beds till there was hardly a flower 
left standing; then they trampled down each 
other's bits of the garden out of spite ; and the 

158 



The Mystery of Life 

girls cried till they could cry no more ; and so 
they all lay down at last breathless in the ruin, 
and waited for the time when they were to be 
taken home in the evening.* 

Meanwhile, the children in the house had 
been making themselves happy also in their 
manner. For them, there had been provided 
every kind of in-doors pleasure : there was 
music for them to dance to ; and the library 
was open, with all manner of amusing books; 
and there was a museum, full of the most curi- 
ous shells, and animals, and birds ; and there 
was a workshop, with lathes and carpenters' 
tools, for the ingenious boys ; and there were 
pretty fantastic dresses, for the girls to dress 
in ; and there were microscopes, and kaleido- 
scopes ; and whatever toys a child could fancy; 
and a table, in the dining-room, loaded with 
everything nice to eat. 

But, in the midst of all this, it struck two or 
three of the more "practical" children, that 
they would like some of the brass-headed nails 
that studded the chairs ; and so they set to 
work to pull them out. Presently, the others, 
who were reading, or looking at shells, took a 
fancy to do the like ; and, in a little while, all 

* I have sometimes been asked what this means. I intended 
it to set forth the wisdom of men in war contending for king- 
doms, and what follows to set forth their wisdom in peace, 
contending for wealth. 

159 



John Ruskin 

the children, nearly, were spraining their fingers, 
in pulling out brass-headed nails. With all 
that they could pull out, they were not satis- 
fied; and then, everybody wanted some of 
somebody else's. And at last the really practi- 
cal and sensible ones declared, that nothing was 
of any real consequence, that afternoon, except 
to get plenty of brass- headed nails ; and that 
the books, and the cakes, and the microscopes 
were of no use at all in themselves, but only, if 
they could be exchanged for nail-heads. And, 
at last, they began to fight for nail-heads, as 
the others fought for the bits of garden. Only 
here and there, a despised one shrank away 
into a corner, and tried to get a little quiet with 
a book, in the midst of the noise; but all the 
practical ones thought of nothing else but count- 
ing nail-heads all the afternoon — even though 
they knew they would not be allowed to carry 
so much as one brass knob away with them. 
But no — it was — "who has most nails? I 
have a hundred and you have fifty; or I have 
a thousand and you have two. I must have as 
many as you before I leave the house, or I can- 
not possibly go home in peace." At last, they 
made so much noise that I awoke, and thought 
to myself, " What a false dream that is, of 
children." The child is the father of the man; 
and wiser. Children never do such foolish 
things. Only men do. 
160 



The Mystery of Life 

But there is yet one last class of persons to be 
interrogated. The wise religious men we have 
asked in vain ; the wise contemplative men, 
in vain; the wise worldly men, in vain. But 
there is another group yet. In the midst of 
this vanity of empty religion — of tragic con- 
templation — of wrathful and wretched ambi- 
tion, and dispute for dust, there is yet one great 
group of persons, by whom all these disputers 
live — the persons who have determined, or 
have had it by a beneficent Providence deter- 
mined for them, that they will do something 
useful ; that whatever may be prepared for them 
hereafter, or happen to them here, they will, at 
least, deserve the food that God gives them by 
winning it honourably; and that, however fal- 
len from the purity, or far from the peace, of 
Eden, they will carry out the duty of human 
dominion, though they have lost its felicity; 
and dress and keep the wilderness, though they 
no more can dress or keep the garden. 

These, — hewers of wood, and drawers of 
water — these bent under burdens, or torn of 
scourges — these, that dig and weave — that 
plant and build ; workers in wood, and in mar- 
ble, and in iron — by whom all food, clothing, 
habitation, furniture, and means of delight are 
produced, for themselves, and for all men 
beside; men, whose deeds are good, though 
their words may be few ; men, whose lives are 
161 



John Ruskin 

serviceable, be they never so short, and worthy 
of honour, be they never so humble ; — from 
these, surely at least, we may receive some clear 
message of teaching : and pierce, for an instant, 
into the mystery of life, and of its arts. 

Yes; from these, at last, we do receive a les- 
son. But I grieve to say, or rather — for that 
is the deeper truth of the matter — I rejoice to 
say — this message of theirs can only be re- 
ceived by joining them — not by thinking about 
them. 

You sent for me to talk to you of art ; and I 
have obeyed you in coming. But the main 
thing I have to tell you is, — that art must not 
be talked about. The fact that there is talk 
about it at all, signifies that it is ill done, or 
cannot be done. No true painter ever speaks, 
or ever has spoken, much of his art. The 
greatest speak nothing. Even Reynolds is no 
exception, for he wrote of all that he could not 
himself do, and was utterly silent respecting 
all that he himself did. 

The moment a man can really do his work, 
he becomes speechless about it. All words 
become idle to him — all theories. 

Does a bird need to theorise about building 
its nest, or boast of it when built ? All good work 
is essentially done that way — without hesitation, 
without difficulty, without boasting; and in the 
doers of the best, there is an inner and involun- 
162 



The Mystery of Life 

tary power which approximates literally to the in- 
stinct of an animal — nay, I am certain that in 
the most perfect human artists, reason does not 
supersede instinct, but is added to an instinct 
as much more divine than that of the lower 
animals as the human body is more beautiful 
than theirs; that a great singer sings not with 
less instinct than the nightingale, but with more 
— only more various, applicable, and govern- 
able ; that a great architect does not build with 
less instinct than the beaver or the bee, but 
with more — with an innate cunning of propor- 
tion that embraces all beauty, and a divine in- 
genuity of skill that improvises all construction. 
But be that as it may — be the instinct less or 
more than that of inferior animals — like or un- 
like theirs, still the human art is dependent on 
that first, and then upon an amount of practice, 
of science, — and of imagination disciplined by 
thought, which the true possessor of it knows 
to be incommunicable, and the true critic of it, 
inexplicable, except through long process of 
laborious years. That journey of life's con- 
quest, in which hills over hills, and Alps on 
Alps arose, and sank, — do you think you can 
make another trace it painlessly, by talking? 
Why, you cannot even carry us up an Alp, by 
talking. You can guide us up it, step by step, 
no otherwise — even so, best silently. You 
girls, who have been among the hills, know 
163 



John Ruskin 

how the bad guide chatters and gesticulates, 
and it is " put your foot here," and " mind how 
you balance yourself there ; " but the good 
guide walks on quietly, without a word, only 
with his eyes on you when need is, and his arm 
like an iton bar, if need be. 

In that slow way, also, art can be taught — 
if you have faith in your guide, and will let 
his arm be to you as an iron bar when need is. 
But in what teacher of art have you such faith ? 
Certainly not in me ; for, as I told you at first, 
I know well enough it is only because you think 
I can talk, not because you think I know my 
business, that you let me speak to you at all. 
If I were to tell you anything that seemed to 
you strange, you would not believe it, and yet 
it would only be in telling you strange things 
that I could be of use to you, I could be of 
great use to you — infinite use, with brief say- 
ing, if you would believe it ; but you would not, 
just because the thing that would be of real use 
would displease you. You are all wild, for in- 
stance, with admiration of Gustave Dore. 
Well, suppose I were to tell you in the strongest 
terms I could use, that Gustave Dore's art 
was bad — bad, not in weakness, — not in fail- 
ure,— but bad with dreadful power — the power 
of the Furies and the Harpies mingled, enrag- 
ing, and polluting; that so long as you looked 
at it, no perception of pure or beautiful art was 
164 



The Mystery of Life 

possible for you. Suppose I were to tell you 
that ! What would be the use ? Would you 
look at Gustave Dore less ? Rather more, I 
fancy. On the other hand, I could soon put 
you into good humour with me, if I chose. I 
know well enough what you like, and how to 
praise it to your better liking. I could talk to 
you about moonlight, and twilight, and spring 
flowers, and autumn leaves, and the Madonnas 
of Raphael — how motherly! and the Sibyls 
of Michael Angelo — how majestic! and the 
Saints of Angelico — how pious! and the Cher- 
ubs of Correggio — how delicious! Old as I 
am, I could play you a tune on the harp yet, 
that you would dance to. But neither you nor 
I should be a bit the better or wiser ; or, if we 
were, our increased wisdom could be of no prac- 
tical effect. For, indeed, the arts, as regards 
teachableness, differ from the sciences also in 
this, that their power is founded not merely on 
facts which can be communicated, but on dis- 
positions which require to be created. Art is 
neither to be achieved by effort of thinking, nor 
explained by accuracy of speaking. It is the 
instinctive and necessary result of powers which 
can only be developed through the mind of suc- 
cessive generations, and which finally burst into 
life under social conditions as slow of growth as 
the faculties they regulate. Whole seras of 
mighty history are summed, and the passions 

165 



John Ruskin 

of dead myriads are concentrated in the exist- 
ence of a noble art ; and if that noble art were 
among us, we should feel it and rejoice; not 
caring in the least to hear lectures on it ; and 
since it is not among us, be assured we have to 
go back to the root of it, or, at least, to the 
place where the stock of it is yet alive, and the 
branches began to die. 

And now, may I have your pardon for point- 
ing out, partly with reference to matters which 
are at this time of greater moment than the arts 
— that if we undertook such recession to the 
vital germ of national arts that have decayed, 
we should find a more singular arrest of their 
power in Ireland than in any other European 
country. For in the eighth century, Ireland 
possessed a school of art in her manuscripts and 
sculpture, which, in many of its qualities — ap- 
parently in all essential qualities of decorative 
invention — was quite without rival; seeming 
as if it might have advanced to the highest tri- 
umphs in architecture and in painting. But 
there was one fatal flaw in its nature, by which 
it was stayed, and stayed with a conspicuousness 
of pause to which there is no parallel : so that, 
long ago, in tracing the progress of European 
schools from infancy to strength, I chose for the 
students of Kensington, in a lecture since pub- 
lished, two characteristic examples of early art, 
of equal skill ; but in the one case, skill which 
1 66 



The Mystery of Life 

was progressive — in the other, skill which 
was at pause. In the one case, it was work 
receptive of correction — hungry for correction 
— and in the other, work which inherently re- 
jected correction. I chose for them a cor- 
rigible Eve, and an incorrigible Angel, and I 
grieve to say that the incorrigible Angel was 
also an Irish angel ! * 

And the fatal difference lay wholly in this. 
In both pieces of art there was an equal falling 
short of the needs of fact ; but the Lombardic 
Eve knew she was in the wrong, and the Irish 
Angel thought himself all right. The eager 
Lombardic sculptor, though firmly insisting on 
his childish idea, yet showed in the irregular 
broken touches of the features, and the imper- 
fect struggle for softer lines in the form, a per- 
ception of beauty and law that he could not 
render; there was the strain of effort, under 
conscious imperfection, in every line. But the 
Irish missal-painter had drawn his angel with 
no sense of failure, in happy complacency, and 
put red dots into the palms of each hand, and 
rounded the eyes into perfect circles, and, I re- 
gret to say, left the mouth out altogether, with 
perfect satisfaction to himself. 

May I without offence ask you to consider 
whether this mode of arrest in ancient Irish art 
may not be indicative of points of character 

* See The Two Paths, p. 27. 
167 



John Ruskin 

which even yet, in some measure, arrest your 
national power ? I have seen much of Irish 
character, and have watched it closely, for I 
have also much loved it. And I think the form 
of failure to which it is most liable is this, 
that being generous-hearted, and wholly in- 
tending always to do right, it does not attend 
to the external laws of right, but thinks it must 
necessarily do right because it means to do so, 
and therefore does wrong without finding it out: 
and then when the consequences of its wrong 
come upon it, or upon others connected with it, 
it cannot conceive that the wrong is in anywise 
of its causing or of its doing, but flies into 
wrath, and a strange agony of desire for justice, 
as feeling itself wholly innocent, which leads it 
farther astray, until there is nothing that it is 
not capable of doing with a good conscience. 

But mind, I do not mean to say that, in past 
or present relations between Ireland and Eng- 
land, you have been wrong, and we right. Far 
from that, I believe that in all great questions 
of principle, and in all details of administration 
of law, you have been usually right, and we 
wrong; sometimes in misunderstanding you, 
sometimes in resolute iniquity to you. Never- 
theless, in all disputes between states, though 
the strongest is nearly always mainly in the 
wrong, the weaker is often so in a minor de- 
gree ; and I think we sometimes admit the pos- 
sibility of our being in error, and you never do. 
1 68 



The Mystery of Life 

And now, returning to the broader question 
what these arts and labours of life have to teach 
us of its mystery, this is the first of their lessons 
■ — that the more beautiful the art, the more it 
is essentially the work of people who feel them- 
selves wrong; — who are striving for the fulfil- 
ment of a law, and the grasp of a loveliness, 
which they have not yet attained, which they 
feel even farther and farther from attaining, the 
more they strive for it. And yet, in still deeper 
sense, it is the work of people who know also 
that they are right. The very sense of inevit- 
able error from their purpose marks the per- 
fectness of that purpose, and the continued 
sense of failure arises from the continued open- 
ing of the eyes more clearly to all the sacredest 
laws of truth. 

This is one lesson. The second is a very 
plain, and greatly precious one, namely: — that 
whenever the arts and labours of life are ful- 
filled in this spirit of striving against misrule, 
and doing whatever we have to do, honourably 
and perfectly, they invariably bring happiness, 
as much as seems possible to the nature of man. 
In all other paths, by which that happiness is 
pursued, there is disappointment, or destruc- 
tion : for ambition and for passion there is no 
rest — no fruition ; the fairest pleasures of 
youth perish in a darkness greater than their 
past light ; and the loftiest and purest love too 
often does but inflame the cloud of life with 
169 



John Ruskin 

endless fire of pain. But, ascending from low- 
est to highest, through every scale of human 
industry, that industry worthily followed, gives 
peace. Ask the labourer in the field, at the 
forge, or in the mine ; ask the patient, delicate- 
fingered artisan, or the strong-armed, fiery- 
hearted worker in bronze, and in marble, and 
in the colours of light ; and none of these, who 
are true workmen, will ever tell you, that they 
have found the law of heaven an unkind one — 
that in the sweat of their face they should eat 
bread, till they return to the ground; nor that 
they ever found it an unrewarded obedience, if, 
indeed, it was rendered faithfully to the com- 
mand — "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do 
— do it with thy might." 

These are the two great and constant lessons 
which our labourers teach us of the mystery of 
life. But there is another, and a sadder one, 
which they cannot teach us, which we must 
read on their tombstones. 

"Do it with thy might." There have been 
myriads upon myriads of human creatures who 
have obeyed this law — who have put every 
breath and nerve of their being into its toil — 
who have devoted every hour, and exhausted 
every faculty — who have bequeathed their un- 
accomplished thoughts at death — who being 
dead, have yet spoken, by majesty of memory, 
and strength of example. And, at last, what 
170 



The Mystery of Life 

has all this " Might" of humanity accomplished, 
in six thousand years of labour and sorrow ? 
What has it done ? Take the three chief occu- 
pations and arts of men, one by one, and count 
their achievements. Begin with the first — the 
lord of them all — agriculture. Six thousand 
years have passed since we were sent to till the 
ground, from which we were taken. How much 
of it is tilled ? How much of that which is, 
wisely or well ? In the very centre and chief gar- 
den of Europe — where the two forms of parent 
Christianity have had their fortresses — where 
the noble Catholics of the Forest Cantons, and 
the noble Protestants of the Vaudois valleys, 
have maintained, for dateless ages, their faiths 
and liberties — there the unchecked Alpine rivers 
yet run wild in devastation : and the marshes, 
which a few hundred men could redeem with a 
a year's labour, still blast their helpless inhabi- 
tants into fevered idiotism. That is so, in the 
centre of Europe ! While, on the near coast of 
Africa, once the Garden of the Hesperides, an 
Arab woman, but a few sunsets since, ate her 
child, for famine. And, with all the treasures 
of the East at our feet, we, in our own domin- 
ion, could not find a few grains of rice, for a 
people that asked of us no more ; but stood by, 
and saw five hundred thousand of them perish 
of hunger. 

Then, after agriculture, the art of kings, take 
171 



John Ruskin 

the next head of human arts — weaving; the 
art of queens, honoured of all noble heathen 
women, in the person of their virgin goddess — 
honoured of all Hebrew women, by the word 
of their wisest king — " She layeth her hands 
to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff; 
she stretcheth out her hand to the poor. She 
is not afraid of the snow for her household, for 
all her household are clothed with scarlet. She 
maketh herself covering of tapestry, her cloth- 
ing is silk and purple. She maketh fine linen, 
and selleth it, and delivereth girdles to the mer- 
chant." What have w T e done in all these thou- 
sands of years with this bright art of Greek 
maid and Christian matron ? Six thousand 
years of weaving, and have we learned to 
weave ? Might not every naked wall have 
been purple with tapestry, and every feeble 
breast fenced with sweet colours from the cold ? 
What have we done ? Our fingers are too few, 
it seems, to twist together some poor covering 
for our bodies. W T e set our streams to work for 
us, and choke the air with fire, to turn our 
spinning-wheels — and, — are we yet clothed? 
Are not the streets of the capitals of Europe 
foul with the sale of cast clouts and rotten rags ? 
Is not the beauty of your sweet children left in 
wretchedness of disgrace, while, with better 
honour, nature clothes the brood of the bird in 
its nest, and the suckling of the wolf in her 
172 



The Mystery of Life 

den ? And does not every winter's snow robe 
what you have not robed, and shroud what 
you have not shrouded ; and every winter's 
wind bear up to heaven its wasted souls, to wit- 
ness against you hereafter, by the voice of their 
Christ, — "I was naked, and ye clothed me 
not?" 

Lastly — take the Art of Building — the 
strongest — proudest — most orderly — most en- 
during of the arts of man, that, of which the 
produce is in the surest manner accumulative, 
and need not perish, or be replaced; but if 
once well done, will stand more strongly than 
the unbalanced rocks — more prevalently than 
the crumbling hills. The art which is associ- 
ated with all civic pride and sacred principle ; 
with which men record their power — satisfy 
their enthusiasm — make sure their defence — 
define and make dear their habitation. And, 
in six thousand years of building, what have 
we done ? Of the greater part of all that skill 
and strength, no vestige is left, but fallen 
stones, that encumber the fields and impede the 
streams. But, from this waste of disorder, and 
of time, and of rage, what is left to us ? Con- 
structive and progressive creatures that we are, 
with ruling brains, and forming hands, capable 
of fellowship, and thirsting for fame, can we 
not contend, in comfort, with the insects of the 
forest, or, in achievement, with the worm of 

173 



John Ruskin 

the sea ? The white surf rages in vain against 
the ramparts built by poor atoms of scarcely 
nascent life ; but only ridges of formless ruin 
mark the places where once dwelt our noblest 
multitudes. The ant and the moth have cells 
for each of their young, but our little ones lie in 
festering heaps, in homes that consume them 
like graves ; and night by night, from the 
corners of our streets, rises up the cry of the 
homeless — " I was a stranger, and ye took me 
not in.' , 

Must it be always thus ? Is our life for ever 
to be without profit — without possession ? 
Shall the strength of its generations be as bar- 
ren as death ; or cast away their labour, as the 
wild fig tree casts her untimely figs ? Is it all a 
dream then — the desire of the eyes and the 
pride of life — or, if it be, might we not live in 
nobler dream than this ? The poets and pro- 
phets, the wise men, and the scribes, though 
they have told us nothing about a life to come, 
have told us much about the life that is now. 
They have had — they also, — their dreams, 
and we have laughed at them. They have 
dreamed of mercy, and cf justice ; they have 
dreamed of peace and good- will; they have 
dreamed of labour undisappointed, and of rest 
undisturbed; they have dreamed of fulness in 
harvest, and overflowing in store ; they have 
dreamed of wisdom in council, and of providence 
174 



The Mystery ot Life 

in law ; of gladness of parents, and strength of 
children, and glory of grey hairs. And at 
these visions of theirs we have mocked, and 
held them for idle and vain, unreal and unac- 
complishable. What have we accomplished 
with our realities? Is this what has come of 
our worldly wisdom, tried against their folly? 
this our mightiest possible, against their im- 
potent ideal? or have we only wandered among 
the spectra of a baser felicity, and chased phan- 
toms of the tombs, instead of visions of the 
Almighty; and walked after the imaginations 
of our evil hearts, instead of after the counsels 
of Eternity, until our lives — not in the likeness 
of the cloud of heaven, but of the smoke of 
hell — have become " as a vapour, that ap- 
peareth for a little time, and then vanisheth 
away ? " 

Does it vanish then ? Are you sure of that ? — 
sure, that the nothingness of the grave will be 
a rest from this troubled nothingness; and that 
the coiling shadow, which disquiets itself in 
vain, cannot change into the smoke of the tor- 
ment that ascends for ever? Will any answer 
that they are sure of it, and that there is no 
fear, nor hope, nor desire, nor labour, whither 
they go? Be it so; will you not, then, make 
as sure of the Life, that now is, as you are of 
the Death that is to come ? Your hearts are 
wholly in this world — will you not give them to 

*75 



John Ruskin 

it wisely, as well as perfectly ? And see, first 
of all, that you have hearts, and sound hearts, 
too, to give. Because you have no heaven to 
look for, is that any reason that you should 
remain ignorant of this wonderful and infinite 
earth, which is firmly and instantly given you 
in possession ? Although your days are num- 
bered, and the following darkness sure, is it 
necessary that you should share the degradation 
of the brute, because you are condemned to its 
mortality ; or live the life of the moth, and 
of the worm, because you are to companion 
them in the dust? Not so; we may have 
but a few thousands of days to spend, perhaps 
hundreds only — perhaps tens; nay, the longest 
of our time and best, looked back on, will be 
but as a moment, as the twinkling of an eye ; 
still, we are men, not insects; we are living 
spirits, not passing clouds. " He maketh the 
winds His messengers ; the momentary fire, 
His minister ; " and shall we do less than these t 
Let us do the work of men while we bear the 
form of them; and, as we snatch our narrow 
portion of time out of Eternity, snatch also our 
narrow inheritance of passion out of Immortal- 
ity — even though our lives ^as a vapour, that 
appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth 
away. 

But there are some of you who believe not 
this — who think this cloud of life has no such 
176 



The Mystery of Life 

close — that it is to float, revealed and illu- 
mined, upon the floor of heaven, in the day 
when He cometh with clouds, and every eye 
shall see Him. Some day, you believe, within 
these five, or ten, or twenty years, for every 
one of us the judgment will be set, and the 
books opened. If that be true, far more than 
that must be true. Is there but one day of 
judgment ? Why, for us every day is a day of 
judgment — every day is a Dies Irae, and writes 
its irrevocable verdict in the flame of its West. 
Think you that judgment waits till the doors 
of the grave are opened? It waits at the doors 
of your houses — it waits at the corners of your 
streets ; we are in the midst of judgment — the 
insects that we crush are our judges — the mo- 
ments that we fret away are our judges — the 
elements that feed us, judge, as they minister 
— and the pleasures that deceive us, judge as 
they indulge. Let us, for our lives, do the 
work of Men while we bear the Form of them, 
if indeed those lives are Not as a vapour, and 
do Not vanish away. 

"The work of men" — and what is that? 
Well, we may any of us know very quickly, on 
the condition of being wholly ready to do it. 
But many of us are for the most part thinking, 
not of what we are to do, but of what we are to 
get ; and the best of us are sunk into the sin 
of Ananias, and it is a mortal one — we want 
177 



John Ruskin 

to keep back part of the price ; and we continu- 
ally talk of taking up our cross, as if the only 
harm in a cross was the weight of it — as if it 
was only a thing to be carried, instead of to be 
— crucified upon. " They that are His have 
crucified the flesh, with the affections and lusts. " 
Does that mean, think you, that in time of 
national distress, of religious trial, of crisis for 
every interest and hope of humanity — none of 
us will cease jesting, none cease idling, none put 
themselves to any wholesome work, none take 
so much as a tag of lace off their footmen's 
coats, to save the world? Or does it rather 
mean, that they are ready to leave houses, 
lands, and kindreds — yes, and life, if need be? 
Life ! — some of us are ready enough to throw 
that away, joyless as we have made it. But 
" station in Life " — how many of us are ready 
to quit that? Is it not always the great objec- 
tion, where there is question of finding some- 
thing useful to do — "We cannot leave our 
stations in Life ? " 

Those of us who really cannot — that is to 
say, who can only maintain themselves by con- 
tinuing in some business or salaried office, have 
already something to do : and all that they 
have to see to, is that they do it honestly and 
with all their might. But with most people 
who use that apology, "remaining in the sta- 
tion of life to which Providence has called them," 
178 



The Mystery of Life 

means keeping all the carriages, and all the 
footmen and large houses they can possibly pay 
for ; and, once for all, I say that if ever Provi- 
dence did put them into stations of that sort 
— which is not at all a matter of certainty — 
Providence fc> just now vefy distinctly calling 
them out again. Levi's station in life was the 
receipt of custom; and Peter's, the shore of 
Galilee; and Paul's, the antechambers of the 
High Priest, — which " station in life " each had 
to leave, with brief notice. 

And, whatever our station in life may be, at 
this crisis, those of us who mean to fulfil our 
duty ought, first, to live on as little as we can ; 
and, secondly, to do all the wholesome work for 
it we can, and to spend all we can spare in doing 
all the sure good we can. 

And sure good is first in feeding people, then 
in dressing people, then in lodging people, and 
lastly in rightly pleasing people, with arts, or 
sciences, or any other subject of thought. 

I say first in feeding ; and, once for all, do 
not let yourselves be deceived by any of the 
common talk of " indiscriminate charity." The 
order to us is not to feed the deserving hungry^ 
nor the industrious hungry, nor the amiable 
and well-intentioned hungry, but simply to feed 
the hungry. It is quite true, infallibly true, 
that if any man will not work, neither should he 
eat — think of that, and every time you sit 
179 



John Ruskin 

down to your dinner, ladies and gentlemen, 
say solemnly, before you ask a blessing, " How 
much work have I done to-day for my dinner ? " 
But the proper way to enforce that order on 
those below you, as well as on yourselves, is not 
to leave vagabonds and honest people to starve 
together, but very distinctly to discern and 
seize your vagabond; and shut your vagabond 
up out of honest people's way, and very sternly 
then see that, until he has worked, he does not 
eat. But the first thing is to be sure you have 
the food to give ; and, therefore, to enforce the 
organisation of vast activities in agriculture and 
in commerce, for the production of the whole- 
somest food, and proper storing and distribu- 
tion of it, so that no famine shall any more 
be possible among civilised beings. There is 
plenty of work in this business alone, and at 
once, for any number of people who like to 
engage in it. 

Secondly, dressing people — that is to say, 
urging every one within reach of your influence 
to be always neat and clean, and giving them 
means of being so. In so far as they absolutely 
refuse, you must give up the effort with respect 
to them, only taking care that no children 
within your sphere of influence shall any more 
be brought up with such habits ; and that every 
person who is willing to dress with propriety 
shall have encouragement to do so. And the 






The Mystery of Life 

first absolutely necessary step towards this is the 
gradual adoption of a consistent dress for differ- 
ent ranks of persons, so that their rank shall be 
known by their dress ; and the restriction of 
the changes of fashion within certain limits. 
All which appears for the present quite impos- 
sible ; but it is only so far as even difficult as it 
is difficult to conquer our vanity, frivolity, and 
desire to appear what we are not. And it is 
not, nor ever shall be, creed of mine, that these 
mean and shallow vices are unconquerable by 
Christian women. 

And then, thirdly, lodging people, which you 
may think should have been put first, but I put 
it third, because we must feed and clothe people 
where we find them, and lodge them afterwards. 
And providing lodgment for them means a 
great deal of vigorous legislation, and cutting 
down of vested interests that stand in the way, 
and after that, or before that, so far as we can 
get it, thorough sanitary and remedial action in 
the houses that we have ; and then the building 
of more, strongly, beautifully, and in groups 
of limited extent, kept in proportion to their 
streams, and walled round, so that there may 
be no festering and wretched suburb anywhere, 
but clean and busy street within, and the open 
country without, with a belt of beautiful garden 
and orchard round the walls, so that from any 
part of the city perfectly fresh air and grass, 
181 



John Ruskin 

and sight of far horizon might be reachable 
in a few minutes' walk. This is the final aim ; 
but in immediate action every minor and pos- 
sible good to be instantly done, when, and as, 
we can ; roofs mended that have holes in them 
— fences patched that have gaps in them — 
walls buttressed that totter — and floors propped 
that shake ; cleanliness and order enforced with 
our own hands and eyes, till we are breathless, 
every day. And all the fine arts will healthily 
follow. I myself have washed a flight of stone 
stairs all down, with bucket and broom, in a 
Savoy inn, where they hadn't washed their 
stairs since they first went up them ; and I 
never made a better sketch than that afternoon. 
These, then, are the three first needs of civil- 
ised life ; and the law for every Christian man 
and woman is, that they shall be in direct ser- 
vice towards one of these three needs, as far as 
is consistent with their own special occupation, 
and if they have no special business, then 
wholly in one of these services. And out of 
such exertion in plain duty all other good will 
come ; for in this direct contention with ma- 
terial evil, you will find out the real nature of 
all evil ; you will discern by the various kinds 
of resistance, what is really the fault and main 
antagonism to good; also you will find the 
most unexpected helps and profound lessons 
given, and truths will come less down to us 
182 



The Mystery of Life 

which the speculation of all our lives would 
never have raised us up to. You will find 
nearly every educational problem solved, as 
soon as you truly want to do something; 
everybody will become of use in their own fit- 
test way, and will learn what is best for them 
to know in that use. Competitive examination 
will then, and not till then, be wholesome, be- 
cause it will be daily, and calm, and in prac- 
tice ; and on these familiar arts, and minute, 
but certain and serviceable knowledges, will be 
surely edified and sustained the greater arts and 
splendid theoretical sciences. 

But much more than this. On such holy 
and simple practice will be founded, indeed, at 
last, an infallible religion. The greatest of all 
the mysteries of life, and the most terrible, is 
the corruption of even the sincerest religion, 
which is not daily founded on rational, effective, 
humble, and helpful action. Helpful action, 
observe ! for there is just one law, which obeyed, 
keeps all religions pure — forgotten, makes 
them all false. Whenever in any religious 
faith, dark or bright, we allow our minds to 
dwell upon the points in which we differ from 
other people, we are wrong, and in the devil's 
power. That is the essence of the Pharisee's 
thanksgiving — " Lord, I thank thee that I am 
not as other men are." At every moment of 
our lives we should be trying to find out, not in 

183 



John Ruskin 

what we differ with other people, but in what 
we agree with them ; and the moment we find 
we can agree as to anything that should be 
done, kind or good, (and who but fools couldn't?) 
then do it ; push at it together ; you can't quar- 
rel in a side-by-side push ; but the moment that 
even the best men stop pushing, and begin 
talking, they mistake their pugnacity for piety, 
and it's all over. I will not speak of the crimes 
which in past times have been committed in the 
name of Christ, nor of the follies which are at 
this hour held to be consistent with obedience 
to Him : but I will speak of the morbid corrup- 
tion and waste of vital power in religious senti- 
ment, by which the pure strength of that which 
should be the guiding soul of every nation, the 
splendour of its youthful manhood, and spotless 
light of its maidenhood, is averted or cast away. 
You may see continually girls who have never 
been taught to do a single useful thing thor- 
oughly; who cannot sew, who cannot cook, 
who cannot cast an account, nor prepare a 
medicine, whose whole life has been passed 
either in play or in pride ; you will find girls 
like these when they are earnest-hearted, cast 
all their innate passion of religious spirit, which 
was meant by God to support them through 
the irksomeness of daily toil, into grievous and 
vain meditation over the meaning of the great 
Book, of which no syllable was ever yet to be 
184 



The Mystery of Life 

understood but through a deed ; all the instinc- 
tive wisdom and mercy of their womanhood 
made vain, and the glory of their pure con- 
sciences warped into fruitless agony concerning 
questions which the laws of common service- 
able life would have either solved for them in 
an instant, or kept out of their way. Give such 
a girl any true work that will make her active 
in the dawn, and weary at night, with the con- 
sciousness that her fellow-creatures have indeed 
been the better for her day, and the powerless 
sorrow of her enthusiasm will transform itself 
into a majesty of radiant and beneficent peace. 
So with our youths. We once taught them 
to make Latin verses, and called them edu- 
cated ; now we teach them to leap and to row, 
to hit a ball with a bat, and call them educated. 
Can they plough, can they sow, can they plant 
at the right time, or build with a steady hand ? 
Is it the effort of their lives to be chaste, 
knightly, faithful, holy in thought, lovely in 
word and deed ? Indeed it is, with some, nay 
with many, and the strength of England is in 
them, and the hope ; but we have to turn their 
courage from the toil of war to the toil of mercy ; 
and their intellect from dispute of words to dis- 
cernment of things ; and their knighthood from 
the errantry of adventure to the state and fidel- 
ity of a kingly power. And then, indeed, shall 
abide, for them, and for us an incorruptible 

185 



John Ruskin 

felicity, and an infallible religion ; shall abide 
for us Faith, no more to be assailed by tempta- 
tion, no more to be defended by wrath and by 
fear ; — shall abide with us Hope, no more to be 
quenched by the years that overwhelm, or made 
ashamed by the shadows that betray ; shall 
abide for us, and with us, the greatest of these ; 
the abiding will, the abiding name, of our 
Father. For the greatest of these, is Charity. 



186 



Peace 






Peace 



HAVE you ever thought seriously of the mean- 
ing of that blessing given to the peacemakers ? 
People are always expecting to get peace in 
heaven ; but you know whatever peace they 
get there will be ready-made. Whatever mak- 
ing of peace they can be blest for, must be on 
the earth here : not the taking of arms against, 
but the building of nests amidst, its "sea of 
troubles. " Difficult enough, you think? Per- 
haps so, but I do not see that any of us try. 
We complain of the want of many things — we 
want votes, we want liberty, we want amuse- 
ment, we want money. Which of us feels, or 
knows, that he wants peace ? 

There are two ways of getting it, if you do 
want it. The first is wholly in your own power; 
to make yourselves nests of pleasant thoughts. 
Those are nests on the sea indeed, but safe be- 
yond all others; only they need much art in 
the building. None of us yet know, for none 
189 



John Ruskin 

of us have yet been taught in early youth, what 
fairy palaces we may build of beautiful thought 

— proof against all adversity. Bright fancies, 
satisfied memories, noble histories, faithful say- 
ings, treasure-houses of precious and restful 
thoughts, which care cannot disturb, nor pain 
make gloomy, nor poverty take away from us 

— houses built without hands, for our souls to 
live in. 

And in actual life, let me assure you, in con- 
clusion, the first " wisdom of calm," is to plan, 
and resolve to labour for, the comfort and 
beauty of a home such as, if we could obtain it, 
we would quit no more. Not a compartment 
of a model lodging-house, not the number so- 
and-so of Paradise Row; but a cottage all of 
our own, with its little garden, its pleasant view, 
its surrounding fields, its neighbouring stream, 
its healthy air, and clean kitchen, parlours, and 
bedrooms. Less than this, no man should be 
content with for his nest ; more than this few 
should seek : but if it seem to you impossible, 
or wildly imaginary, that such houses should 
ever be obtained for the greater part of the 
English people, again believe me, the obstacles 
which are in the way of our obtaining them are 
the things which it must be the main object now 
of all true science, true art, and true literature 
to overcome. Science does its duty, not in tell- 
ing us the causes of spots in the sun ; but in 
190 



Peace 

explaining to us the laws of our own life, and 
the consequences of their violation. Art does 
its duty, not in filling monster galleries with 
frivolous, or dreadful, or indecent pictures ; but 
in completing the comforts and refining the 
pleasures of daily occurrence, and familiar ser- 
vice : and literature does its duty, not in wast- 
ing our hours in political discussion, or in idle 
fiction; but in raising our fancy to the height of 
what may be noble, honest, and felicitous in ac- 
tual life; — in giving us, though we may ourselves 
be poor and unknown, the companionship of 
the wisest fellow-spirits of every age and coun- 
try, — and in aiding the communication of clear 
thoughts and faithful purposes, among distant 
nations, which will at last breathe calm upon 
the sea of lawless passion, and change into such 
halcyon days the winter of the world, that the 
birds of the air may have their nests in peace, 
and the Son of Man, where to lay his head. 



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